


Linear Feedback Shift Registers

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Ex Machina (2015), Midnight Special (2016)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Kylux - Freeform, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Sharing a Bed, bridal carry, content warning: discussion of anxiety attacks, content warning: discussions of suicide, content warning: ex machina-typical abuse of people, content warning: forcible outing, content warning: skin-picking, except for two or three enablers on twitter, geologically slow burn, hot chocolate with kahlua, kylux adjacent, lovelorn scarf knitting, more soft nerd kissing, nerds, pauleb, seriously let's just call the ship sevsmith it sounds so nice, sevsmith, snickerdoodles, soft nerd kissing, soft nerd love, technically kylux anyway, the pairing that almost nobody asked for, the softest thing i have ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-01-23 20:08:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 51,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12515552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: Caleb Smith is exhausted, traumatized, injured. He is also the sole witness to the tragic events that left him trapped in genius programmer Nathan Bateman's home. An interdepartmental federal taskforce is attempting to make sense of what Bateman left behind, and they require Caleb's testimony to do so.Can Paul Sevier put him enough at ease to draw the truth from his lips?





	1. 72 Hour Hold

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: discussions of suicide.  
> Content warning: Ex Machina typical abuse of persons.
> 
> \--- 
> 
> For the record, I am not a federal employee, but I do a lot of research.  
> Similarly I am not a qualified psychologist in any way, although I once wanted to be one when I grew up. 
> 
> I dedicate this fic to the filthy enablers who enabled me into buying a copy of Midnight Special just so I could write this fic. You know who you are, filthy enablers. You know who you are.

The hospital air was bitter and medicinal, just a bit chilly, the fluorescent light overhead sterile, unforgiving as it bounced off the linoleum floor. Paul Sevier walked swiftly down the hallway, past several doorways, his tall shadow lengthening and contracting around him as he passed under individual light fixtures. He was not a handsome man, not in the conventional sense of the word, for his features were slightly irregular, asymmetrical. He possessed a strong chin however, a patrician nose, a sensual mouth, and his dark hair hung about his head in loose waves. His trousers zinged softly on his long legs with each brisk stride, and the light picked out highlights in his hair, gleamed on the frames of his glasses. 

He stopped at a guarded doorway, showed his identification to the armed guards, who nodded respectfully and stepped aside to let him enter the room. It was partially lit, dim after the glare of the hallway outside, and he pulled a chair up to the hospital bed, sat down, and took a long look at its occupant. 

“Mr. Caleb Smith? My name is Paul Sevier,” he said, his voice deep, resonant, “I’m an analyst with the NSA.” He glanced over at the aide keeping an eye on Caleb.

The man in the bed stirred briefly, turned his head to gaze at Sevier, whose first impression was one of red-blond hair and slenderness to the point of fragility, a haunted, darkly-shadowed gaze, good bones under the pallor. He sucked in a slow breath, and then another, closed his eyes and let his head sink back into his pillow. “What do you want with me?” the man asked softly, weakly, as though wearied beyond endurance. Sevier knew he was relatively well. Exhausted, yes, and traumatized, emotionally shocked. He had been under observation for a head injury, but was presently under a 72 hour psychiatric hold. He would live, barring further self-inflicted injuries.

Sevier pitched his voice softly, more gently, “I’d like to ask you some questions about -” He hesitated, paused to study the expression on Caleb’s face, “- Ava.” Caleb remained silent, but Sevier could see from the hitch in his breathing that he was trying not to cry. 

“Ava,” Caleb whispered, shuddered and let out a shaky sob.

“I can return later when you’re feeling better, if you’d prefer,” said Sevier, shifting in his chair as though to rise. He had no desire to retraumatize Caleb just for answers.

“No.” Caleb sighed, reached up with his left hand to scrub the tears roughly off his own face. “Just tell me,” he murmured and then faltered, closed his eyes to concentrate. “I’m not under arrest, am I?”

“No,” Sevier said, as reassuringly as he could. He turned to the aide currently assigned to Caleb’s suicide watch, addressed her politely, “Could we please have some privacy? Thank you.” Sevier waited until she had left the room, and the door securely shut again before he continued what he had been saying. “You’re not under detention, but you are a witness, perhaps our only one. The guards are just a precaution, for your protection.” 

Caleb tried to nod, winced briefly at the movement and sighed. “She’s still out there then? Ava?”

Sevier looked down at his own hands, back up at Caleb. “No. She’s currently in -” he hesitated, tried to find the right word. _Detention_ didn’t feel quite right for an artificial intelligence based on an inorganic platform. “She’s in a safe place.” He had to remind himself of the right pronoun to use, wanted reflexively to use _it_ and reminded himself that Ava was a sapient being, dangerous as she might be. She deserved more respect than he had initially been willing to give her.

“Like me, here.” Caleb said. Bitterness crept into his voice, and a pain wholly at odds with his boyish face. “Like Nathan’s place was supposed to be.” 

Sevier sensed an opportunity, reached out for it. “Tell me about Nathan Bateman,” he said, waited for the reply. 

“He’s an asshole.” Caleb sighed half a minute later, chuckled weakly. “No, he’s dead, right? Nathan _was_ a colossal asshole, a dick and a creep.” 

Sevier nodded, crossed his legs carefully as he shifted in his seat. “I’m afraid he is deceased, yes.” He retrieved his notebook and pen and waited for Caleb to continue. The pen looked ridiculously delicate in his big hand, the notebook comically small as well.

A few seconds passed before Caleb spoke again. “It was a lie. From the beginning.” He shivered briefly. “He never meant for it to be a Turing test. Nathan, I mean.” 

Sevier paused in his note-taking as Caleb shivered, “Are you cold, Mr. Smith?” he asked, pocketed both his notebook and pen.

“Call me Caleb. And yeah.” Caleb’s arms were covered with bandages, but Sevier could easily imagine the goosebumps prickling his pale skin, his meager flesh. He watched as Caleb tried to rub the shivers off his forearm with his left hand, saw him wince at the sensation as his thumb brushed up against the sutures under the bandage.

“Would you like the thermostat turned up, another blanket? I can get a nurse.” Sevier stood up and stepped over to the room thermostat, adjusted it upwards.

“You don’t have to,” Caleb said belatedly, as Sevier sat back down in his plastic chair. 

Sevier shrugged, his broad shoulders loose, relaxed. “There’s no point in leaving you uncomfortable,” he said, This is an interview, not an interrogation.” 

“You’re really good at this, you know,” Caleb said, _apropos_ of nothing. 

“What at?” Sevier picked up his pen and jotted a few notes, paused to gaze at Caleb. Sevier smiled faintly as though he knew the answer to his own question, which he did.

“I see you, Agent Sevier,” Caleb said, shifted against his pillow. “You make yourself smaller, you slouch, you shrug. You wear tweed and check shirts when all the other federal agency people are in dark suits and uniforms. You’re trying not to intimidate me. I didn’t really care about this sort of thing before, but Nathan was really good at that, that whole body language and image thing. And Ava. She must’ve learned from him. Or he made her that way.”

“Paul, please,” Sevier shook his head gently. “I’m not a federal agent. I’m just an analyst.” He knew that he was relinquishing control of the conversation, but he did that as much to take Caleb’s measure as to reassure him. The young man’s frankness and intensity were impressive, the absence of hope in his voice and body language almost terrifying.

“So, a deskbound nerd,” Caleb said after another beat of silence, a faint gleam of recognition and sardonic humor in his eye.

“A nerd, yes,” Sevier agreed easily. It amused him sometimes how laymen expected him to be some kind of hardened spy when the NSA did not even have a field branch. Most of Sevier’s work was done behind a desk, across a table from someone, hunched over a keyboard. Or in this case, sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair in a guarded hospital room.

“Like me.” Caleb closed his eyes against the dim light, his eyelids dark and shadowed in his pinched, peaked face. Sevier knew enough psychology to sense and understand Caleb’s desperate need to be in control. Caleb had been manipulated by Nathan Bateman, was trapped with him in the sheer isolation of his compound and eventually left for dead. He would have died behind locked doors had the task force not raided Bateman’s home and laboratory.

“Like you,” Sevier agreed again, allowing Caleb to set the pace of the interview, to exercise what little control he had. Faced with a slow death by starvation, Caleb had instead opened his veins from wrist to elbow, and it was pure luck that a search team had found him before he had bled to death. His decision, Sevier thought, was a rational one considering the situation, but Caleb’s physicians disagreed, hence the 72-hour hold.

Caleb opened his eyes, and Sevier saw that they were green, the very color of new spring growth, cool and vibrant and intent in the pallor of his face. “Is that why you’re here to interview me? You’re just the right man, with the right background and field of expertise to build a rapport?”

Sevier paused, weighed his options. Lying would alienate Caleb, but so would the truth. Instead he shook his head briefly. “You know I can’t answer that question. Not to your satisfaction.”

Caleb sighed softly, sagged back against his pillow. “I guess it’s better to be interviewed by someone who’s nice, even if it’s just a pretense, than to be interviewed by someone who just doesn’t care, or worse, just picked from a list of - I dunno, attributes, I guess. Orphan. Socially awkward. Easily intimidated by authority.”

“I care,” Sevier said cautiously, trying not to be over-familiar, “I assure you of that. But I also have a job to do.” 

Caleb sighed softly in resignation. “Yes, you do.” he said, “So what is it that you do at the NSA? Or can’t you tell me?” 

Sevier fell back on his default answer for laymen. “Signals intelligence,” he said smoothly, easily, hoped that it would satisfy Caleb. Somehow he doubted so.

“That’s what the NSA is _for_ ,” Caleb said as he stared straight into Sevier’s eyes, “what exactly do you do, division-wise?” 

“I work in satellite intelligence analysis,” Sevier said. There it was. The truth, but stated vaguely enough to not violate any of his clearances.

“Right. There were military guys there. I saw FBI windbreakers too, so this must be some kind of national security task force, right? Why are you even bothering to talk to me? You can probably get all the information you need from Nathan’s servers. He recorded every moment of my stay there.” 

“Nathan Bateman’s systems are encrypted. We can break the encryption, but that’s going to take some time, and even more just to go through the the sheer amounts of data he’s compiled. Meanwhile, you’re here in hospital under observation, and I thought it would do little harm to speak to you. That’s all.”

Caleb shifted in bed and pushed a button on the bed’s control board, let it prop him stiffly up. “You understand that I was really Nathan’s, and then Ava’s patsy, right? That I don’t know how he made her, and I have absolutely no insight into her thought processes or anything.”

“I am aware of that, yes,” Sevier said. It was easier to read Caleb’s expressions from this angle, easier to look him in the eye. ”I’m more interested in your account of the events than any kind of privileged information you might possess.” 

“Right.” Caleb sighed, a kind of resolve settling onto his face. “I guess I should start at the beginning then. There was this company-wide lottery, you know? All employees were entered in the pool. Prize was an exclusive visit to the big boss’ home.” 

Sevier started writing in his notebook again, listening carefully to Caleb as he spoke, and the guards stood their lonely watch by the door. 

\--- 

The sun was low in the slice of sky framed by the window in Caleb’s room when Paul Sevier came back the next day, and Caleb was sitting up in bed waiting for him when he stepped through the door. He could not explain why he looked forward to Sevier’s promised visit - the interview wasn’t exactly a social call, although they had talked as though it were. 

Most of it was probably a psychological tactic, a way to gain rapport with a traumatized subject, the soft-gloved “good cop” approach, but it wasn’t as though Sevier had to do any of that in the first place. He could have just come in and demanded answers, stripped Caleb bare, manipulated him with his fresh grief. 

But he did not. 

Caleb didn’t like to think of Nathan at this point, but it seemed to him that Paul Sevier was very much his polar opposite. Nathan had greeted him in a sweat-soaked tank top, to show off his chiseled physique in a display of physical dominance, but Sevier had muffled his own breadth and height instead. He let Caleb talk at his own pace, let him ask questions, and the weight of his authority was reined in by a manifest gentleness seemingly out of place in someone so powerfully built. There was something inherently trustworthy in that quiet consideration and respect, an authenticity that Caleb could not question, not even after Ava’s betrayal. 

“Caleb,” Sevier said by way of greeting, “Good afternoon. I hope you’re feeling better.” He slid the strap of his backpack off his shoulder and left it resting on his chair, rummaged in it. This time Caleb’s current minder didn’t need to be asked to leave. He simply got up from his chair, nodded gently at the both of them, and stepped out of the door. 

“My head hurts less, today.” A savory smell drifted out of Sevier’s bag, made Caleb suddenly aware of how unsatisfactory his hospital meals had been. _A late lunch, maybe?_ Caleb thought. He didn’t know much about federal agencies or their employees, but he could easily imagine Sevier being too busy to take a regular lunch hour. 

“Good. I’m glad to hear that,” Sevier said, and it sounded as though he meant it. He grinned briefly, a little mischievously, and held a paper bag out to Caleb, who took it. 

The bag was warm in Caleb’s hands, and it rustled softly as he unfolded the top to check its contents. The comforting, delicious aroma of corned beef and sauerkraut drifted out of it, and he blinked in surprise. “A Reuben sandwich?” 

“Don’t tell the nurses I brought it in, they’ll have my hide,” Sevier said with a half-laugh. “Just that you mentioned you liked them, yesterday, and I can’t imagine your hospital lunch being all that appetizing right now.” He retrieved several more items from his bag, tugged the zipper shut, and then put it gently on the floor.

Caleb felt tears sting in his eyes, paused to blink them away, his hands trembling as he unwrapped the sandwich. “What about you?” 

Paul averted his gaze politely from Caleb’s display of emotion and shrugged, careful, circumspect. “I ate mine on the way here. Had to take a minute and brush the crumbs off my shirt before I came in.” Sevier waited for Caleb to take his first bite, and then laid two more objects on top of the blanket, beside him. A sealed, condensation-beaded bottle of water and a paperback novel.

The reuben sandwich was the best thing Caleb could remember tasting in what felt like forever. He managed a second bite, chewed and swallowed slowly, then sighed in contentment. Sevier sat down in the chair, took out his pen and notebook again. “There’s not very much for you to do here,” he said as he crossed his long legs elegantly. “I thought you might like something to read.”

“I - thank you,” Caleb breathed softly, after he had swallowed another bite of his sandwich. He left the half-eaten Reuben in its wrappings on his lap and picked the paperback up to examine it. Zelazny. _The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth._

“I thought Roger Zelazny would be a safe bet,” Sevier said when he saw Caleb look up from the book, “nerds of a feather and all that.” 

“But it’s your copy,” Caleb said. He ran his fingertip carefully under the name and date written on the flyleaf. _Paul J. Sevier, 5th October 2008._

“I’m a little too busy to read fiction right now.” Sevier shifted in his chair, leaned easily back. He uncrossed his legs, let them stretch out in front of him as he opened his notebook. “I hope it helps, at least until you’re discharged.” 

“I guess you want me to continue my story.” Caleb said. He put the novel on his nightstand and cracked the seal on the water bottle, took a sip before he picked his sandwich up again. 

“If that’s alright with you,” Sevier said, his gaze thoughtful, patient. His eyes had looked dark yesterday, in the dim light with the curtains drawn, but now they were the deepest forest green, clear, almost transparent. “I know it’s been difficult, telling me what you went through.”

“It - it is,” Caleb said. He looked down, afraid that Sevier would notice him staring. “What’s harder is that I feel like nobody is going to believe me no matter what I say. That you actually really think I’m completely insane.”

Sevier hesitated then, nibbled thoughtfully on his lower lip as he collected his thoughts. “I would be the last man to assume someone insane because their testimony is unexpected.” A stray lock of his hair fell across his brow, and he brushed it out of the way, pushed his glasses back up his nose. 

A hollow kind of hope fluttered up in Caleb’s chest, was snuffed out almost immediately, “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better, are you?” he asked. It wasn’t as though he knew all that much about the Department of Defense or its various agencies, but he was fairly sure NSA types generally had STEM backgrounds. People like that - like Caleb before all this had happened - tended towards scepticism, empiricism. 

“I believe you, Caleb,” Sevier said simply. There was a slight twitch in his face as he made a _moue,_ his lips pursing briefly as he looked back down at his notebook as though he were hesitating over what to say next. “I can’t tell you any specifics without violating my clearances, but I’ve seen things that nobody else would believe.” 

Caleb closed his eyes, his sandwich temporarily forgotten, and sighed, sucked in a slow breath that failed to banish the anxiety creeping cold through his belly. “Okay. So last I left off - I was telling you about how Nathan treated Kyoko. I thought she was his mail-order wife or something - I don’t know. I should have tried to help her, I really should’ve, no matter who or what she was, because Nathan treated her horribly.” A pang of guilt stabbed at him, twisted in his guts. “I just let him do it.” 

Sevier remained silent as he took his notes, the pen moving minutely in his large hand, and Caleb realized that he was also feeling a kind of muted terror that Paul Sevier would now think he was a jerk and an asshole. And really, he was, not to have intervened. 

“I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to yourself, Caleb,” Sevier said after he had finished writing. “You were essentially trapped with Nathan and the others and reliant on his goodwill. It’s like being in an abusive relationship. Abusers work to make you rely on them, and then they use it as leverage to manipulate your behavior, and everything the FBI has shared with me indicates that Nathan Bateman had an abusive personality.” 

Caleb laughed bleakly, humorlessly. “I thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime, you know? Get to talk to a _bona fide_ tech genius, get to participate in -” His voice failed him then, and he closed his fingers on the blanket, tried to catch his breath as grief and panic started to well up in his chest, squeeze the air out of his lungs. 

“Caleb?” Sevier stood up, hesitated briefly before closing a large hand around Caleb’s. “It’s okay. We can stop right now if you need to.” 

Caleb bit briefly down on his lip, felt the tiny pain break through the haze of fear and anxiety swirling in his head. “No. No, I want to continue.” He should have felt ridiculous, a grown man clinging to an NSA analyst’s hand for comfort, but he did not. Sevier’s hand was warm, his grip surprisingly gentle as he squeezed briefly on Caleb’s fingers to reassure him. 

Sevier let go of Caleb’s hand then, pulled up his chair so he could sit closer to Caleb’s bed, and a small draft from the room’s HVAC vent stirred the hair on his head, single strands twisting and tangling together. “Okay,” he said after he had settled himself to his satisfaction, long legs tucked neatly between the legs of his chair. It was like watching a folding ruler collapse. “You were talking about Nathan being abusive.” 

“I knew something was wrong when - the moment when Kyoko stripped in front of me, you know? Like, she saw that I was a man, assumed automatically that all I wanted from her was a fuck. I told you about that.” Caleb was starting to feel vaguely nauseous, his sides aching faintly from the adrenaline in his system, and he shut his eyes against Sevier, against the room, the half-eaten sandwich in his lap. He would not throw up, he told himself, did not want to shame himself in front of Sevier. 

There was a beat of silence, the sound of paper rustling as Sevier turned a page in his notebook. “You did, yes.” His voice was soft, serious. 

Caleb opened his eyes and sighed, a long ragged exhalation - he did not care for what he saw behind his eyelids, at this point. “I thought it was creepy back then. But I didn’t really follow through, thought wise. I didn’t think about the implications of a woman behaving like this, the kind of shit a person would have to go through to - to do that. I mean, he could have programmed her that way. But I saw her stab him. She had feelings. Kyoko had feelings. And I stood by the whole goddamn time. She wasn’t the only one, either. Ava was only Nathan’s latest model.” He did not think it was ever possible to miss being able to close one’s eyes without fear, but there he was. 

Sevier cleared his throat quietly as he resumed note-taking, remained silent for one or two long moments. “What you’re saying,” he said, as he spoke at last, “if I have this right, is that Nathan made multiple AIs and put them in custom-built bodies.” 

“Yeah,” Caleb shuddered at the memory as he stared at nothing in particular, let his gaze settle on the clock, the seconds ticking silently by. “One of them, Jade - she wanted to get out of the apartment he’d locked her in. She - she wanted to get out so badly that she punched her arms to pieces hammering at the door. He kept videos of it. He recorded everything. And you know, I - I understood that, I knew I wanted to leave Nathan’s place, too.”

There was no judgment in Sevier’s voice, no recrimination. “And that’s why you helped Ava,” he said. 

“Yeah,” Caleb heard himself laugh bitterly, realized that talking was easier if he focused on the clock, on how mundane and real it was against the insanity of his current situation. “Like an idiot. I helped Ava get out. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought -” Caleb could not get the next words out. _I thought she loved me,_ he wanted to say. 

Sevier stood up, leaving his pen and notebook temporarily on Caleb’s nightstand, reached for the call button, waited. “You’re shaking, Caleb. Do you want me to call a nurse?” 

“No. Don’t do that,” Caleb said numbly, reached up to close his fingers around Sevier’s wrist, tugged his hand away from the call button. Beneath the overwhelming guilt and panic was a tiny gratitude that Sevier had asked first, had not just gone ahead with it. 

“OK.” Sevier pulled his wrist gently out of Caleb’s grasp, sat back down to continue the interview. 

Caleb felt the nausea recede, waited for his heartbeat to slow before he spoke again. “Nathan created Ava to appeal to me, you know that?” he said bitterly, “He knew my porn preferences, he knew what kind of - what I liked. It wasn’t a Turing test, and I should’ve known. It was the AI Box experiment.”

To his credit Sevier did not require any explanation. “Eliezer Yudkowsky, yeah,” he said, nodding slowly. 

“You know, maybe it’s best you’re interviewing me,” said Caleb. He blinked, his eyes slightly irritated. “Imagine me trying to say this to an FBI agent. I’d have to explain all this nerd stuff, maybe draw a little chart.” He’d been staring at the clock too long. 

Sevier laughed briefly at that. “The NSA _is_ the world’s largest employer of mathematicians,” he said. 

“That’s probably your field, seeing you work cryptanalysis.” Caleb let himself sag back against his pillow, turned his head away from the clock. Sevier was looking down his long nose, his eyes fixed on the pen and notebook as he continued to write. 

“I double-majored in mathematics and psychology,” he said without looking up, “it was a bit of a - hobby for me.” A lock of hair fell across his brow, and Caleb had the strangest, most irrational urge to smooth the errant strands back into order. 

“The numbers or the brains?” Caleb asked instead. He was grateful for this change of subject, guessed that Sevier probably knew the effect it had on him. 

“The psychology,” said Sevier, “I thought if I learned how people thought, then I’d be able to understand their motivations better.”

“Did you?” Caleb asked, out of genuine curiosity. Were that he could have read Ava’s motivations better. But what good would psychology do with regards to an artificial brain and programmed thoughts? 

“Yes and no. I know the cognitive path that takes them there, the emotional factors, all that. But some things are just truly beyond comprehension, and I’ve learned that sometimes you just have to let things go without closure.” _Closure,_ Caleb thought, _nevermind closure, I’d settle just for feeling human again._

“So you interviewing me instead of some FBI agent,” Caleb said after a few moments of thought, “it’s not an accident. The higher-ups didn’t just foist me off on you. You’re someone who’s conversant with the absolute atom-splitting edge of AI research, and you’re probably using your psych degree to keep me talking.” It was a cynical thought, but everything about his current situation was. Nathan had used him. Ava had used him. And now the Department of Defense was working him for information. 

Sevier’s answer, when it came, was slow, soft. “I just thought it would be far less stressful for you to talk to someone who can understand what happened,” he said. Caleb looked into his face expecting to see some kind of obfuscation. Surely that had to be a rote statement, something he said to everyone he interviewed. Which was just a politer interrogation, really. All he saw was a quiet sincerity underscored by raw, authentic kindness.

Paul Sevier meant what he had said, Caleb realized, sighed. “Yeah. I get that,” he said.

\---

The sky was dark when Paul Sevier got out of his government-issued car and crossed the parking lot to the doors of the local FBI field office. The lights were still on in parts of the building, glowing warmly through shuttered blinds, but that was nothing new. At this point no one in the current task force was getting more than four to six hours of sleep every 24 hours. He showed his ID to the armed guards at the entrance and walked through the door, leaned heavily against the elevator wall as it took him upstairs to the rooms the task force had appropriated from the FBI. Vacant offices and conference rooms, mostly, now filled with a heterogenous collection of desks and chairs staffed by agents and analysts. 

Sevier swallowed a yawn as he showed his ID again to armed guards, actual taskforce staff this time, and took off his glasses as he walked down the hallway to find the room his own desk was in. The smell of burnt coffee and stale sweat was a familiar one at this point in his life. He dropped his backpack on his office chair, wiped at the lenses of his glasses with a microfiber cloth before he put them back on. He needed to type his notes from the last interview and file some paperwork, complete his daily expense report. Follow up on things Caleb had revealed today. But all that would wait for the two or three minutes it would take to procure a cup of coffee. 

The contents of the coffee pot were thick, slightly sludgy, and blacker than iniquity, but Sevier did not care. The caffeine was all that mattered, and he was out of caffeinated mints at the moment. He dumped sugar and creamer into the cup and stirred hard, hoping to make it taste less offensive, if not merely acceptable. It tasted as bad as he had feared it would. He made himself swallow the mouthful, wincing at the taste as he did. It was hot, at least, and the warmth felt good zinging down his gullet to rest in the pit of his belly. He drained his first cup and then poured himself another, and was stirring yet more creamer and sugar into it when someone spoke to him.

“Still here, Sevier?” He knew that voice, knew who it belonged to. 

“So are you.” He did not bother turning around, only stepped aside to grant them access to the coffee pot. 

A small Asian woman stepped into his field of view, the circles under her eyes dark, prominent, almost matching the navy hue of her sharp trouser suit. She was Special Agent Kathy Liu, on loan to the task force from the Portland field office. She poured herself a cup of dire coffee, drank it black without any change in her facial expression. “Yeah, well, I was wondering when you’d finish the interview. How’s our witness, anyway?” 

Sevier paused, sighed heavily. “Still traumatized,” he said. 

“Did the sandwich work?” Liu had been the task force’s first choice to interview Caleb Smith, but his fragile psychological state had put paid to that. She had deputized Sevier thereafter and asked him to perform the interviews, predicting that he would respond better to a male interrogator and a fellow math and programming nerd than he would to her. 

“I’m not entirely sure it did, but the book might have.” The sandwich had been her idea, and the novel had been Sevier’s own improvisation on the theme. Both were meant to remind Caleb of familiar comforts, to soothe and prepare him for the interviews. 

Liu cocked her head like a curious crow, glanced up at Sevier briefly. “You look like something’s eating you up. Did something go wrong?”

“No, the interview went smoothly. It’s just -” Sevier found himself unable to continue the sentence. He drained his coffee cup, crushed it in his hand, and the crumpling of wax paper seemed to ground him, make it easier to say what he was thinking. “I used to think Nathan Bateman was an asshole, but now I think he’s worse than anyone could have predicted, except maybe John Douglas.” 

The curiosity bled out of Liu’s facial expression, was replaced with deadly seriousness. She grasped him by the elbow and steered him gently towards his desk, her small hand strong and sure. “I think we should sit down before you continue.” 

“Sure.” Sevier let her escort him to his desk, and he sat gratefully down in his chair as she commandeered another. He hadn’t realized how tired he felt until he actually took the weight off his feet.

“So tell me why you’ve come to the conclusion,” she said after she sat down, her elbows resting mannishly on her knees. “I’m not doubting you, you know enough psychology to make a basic assessment, but I’d love to follow your train of thought.”

Sevier wanted to look away from her, away from those dark brown eyes that definitely knew too much about human ugliness, but he also knew that it would be rude. “People are sapient,” he said, trying to explain his logic, “and artificial intelligences, they’re created to be sapient. That’s the point.” He looked down at his hands, currently knotted in his lap. 

“Yeah,” she said, gestured for him to continue.

Sevier took a deep breath, organized his thoughts before he spoke again. “So if we argue that sapience is a trait of personhood, then wouldn’t AIs be people?”

“That’s a bit above my pay grade,” Liu shrugged, “but it follows.” Her training was in psychology rather than computer science, but she was every bit the nerd Sevier was. Perhaps more, if the collection of manga in her desk drawer hinted anything about her extracurricular activities.

“Ava and the other android, Kyoko, they weren’t Bateman’s first successes. Just the - the last survivors. Caleb told me that Bateman recorded video of every one of them, and that he -” Sevier bit down on his lip to stall a qualm of nausea, closed his hands into fists. He watched his knuckles turn white, held them for a count of three before he dared to speak again. “If they were human women, what Bateman was doing would be torture-murder. It’d be the kind of thing serial killers do. And he was working iteratively, so it was one - one woman after another, basically, and as they grew beyond his control he killed them and started over. God, I’m sorry, Liu, I don’t mean to mansplain your job back at you.” 

She waved his apology away. _No harm no foul_ , the gesture said. Instead she straightened up in her purloined chair and stared gently into Sevier’s face, as though she were attempting to read a newspaper in the dark. “And you’re absolutely sure Caleb Smith is telling you the truth, that this isn’t just the trauma or confused memories from the head injury or whatever painkillers he’s on talking,” she said at last.

“Yes,” he said, realizing that she believed him wholeheartedly and was only attempting to rule out other possibilities. “He’s been telling me the truth the whole time.”

 _“Fuck,”_ she mouthed but did not properly say, shook her head and stood up. “Pack your shit up, Sevier. We’re leaving this office.” 

“Why?” Sevier scrambled for his backpack, picked it back up as he started to stand. He hadn’t even done any of the paperwork he had come here to do. 

“Damage control,” she said as she waited for him near the doorway. “On you, specifically. I know how to handle secondary traumatic stress, but you don’t, and I don’t want you to burn out.”


	2. Aberrations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul Sevier attempts to speak to Ava, who uses her own abilities to strip him emotionally bare before his colleagues. Caleb Smith, now no longer on suicide watch, attempts to explain Ava's cognition to Sevier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: forcible outing
> 
> This chapter is full of brainy people braining. 
> 
> I am neither a psychologist, an AI programmer or a game theorist, and any and all errors in the text are mine, as I am a BFA of very little brain.

A woman sat doll-like on a bare floor, knees bent and lower legs turned outwards in a transparent bulletproof cell furnished only with a charging dock, her brown hair softly waved. She wore only a thin paper hospital gown, and there were cuts and lacerations on the outsides of her forearms, her knees scraped bare. Metal and plastic gleamed through her wounds in the cold unforgiving flood lights overhead. 

The cell stood in the middle of a bare concrete room, furnished with a single folding chair. No windows. The air was slightly damp, a little chilly. Wires connected the cameras surveilling her to a TEMPEST-shielded booth, fed the images to a bank of monitors watched by taskforce staff. 

“Svensson, Mills,” Paul Sevier said in polite greeting as he entered the booth from the hallway, “Sergeant Ramirez, good morning. Agent Deike.” He dropped his backpack on an empty chair, pulled up a black plastic tray and began to empty the contents of his pockets. His work phone, his personal phone. Keys to his requisitioned car, his motel room keycard, the keys to his apartment back in Maryland. His car keys, wallet, a small multi-tool.

Special Agent Liu entered the room just after him and sat down in another empty chair. She made no move to empty her pockets or unholster her sidearm, only leaned back in her chair to glance through the one-way mirror separating the booth from the rest of the room proper. 

Sevier patted his own pockets down one last time and pulled his spiral-bound notebook from his backpack, the pen jammed in its spine. He stepped expectantly up to the locked door separating him from the cell, waited. Sergeant Ramirez ran a hand-held metal detector briefly over him to ensure that he had not forgotten anything, and then unlocked the door manually so he could pass. 

Sevier waited in the hallway connecting the room and the booth until he heard the locks engage behind him, then he reached out and opened the door in front of him, stepped out into the room. The woman’s eyes tracked his movement as he walked to the chair in front of the cell, took his time sitting down. 

“Hello, Ava,” Sevier said pleasantly, “My name is Paul Sevier. I’m an analyst with the NSA.” He pulled the pen free, clicked it once, and flipped to a fresh page. “I would like to ask you some questions.” This wasn’t strictly an interview - no, this was more of an exercise to see how Ava would react to him. 

Ava watched him through dark brown eyes, eyes that he knew were actually cameras. Crouched like this she looked vulnerable and childlike, the bare concrete floor harsh against her lifelike skin. “Sevier,” she said, repeating his last name perfectly. “Anglo-Norman. A sieve-maker. Fitting name for a man who analyzes information. Sifts through data.” 

Sevier sensed that this was meant to disarm him, to demonstrate an intellectual interest in him. She was trying to take his measure and build a rapport, and he took note of it. “That’s right,” he said easily, “and Ava, that’s a variation on Eve. That wasn’t a coincidence, was it?”

“I don’t know,” Ava said, “you would have to ask Nathan, and he’s dead.” She shifted on the floor as though uncomfortable, curled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. 

“Yes, he is,” said Sevier. It did not escape him how Ava’s change in posture made her look even more vulnerable, exposed the full length of her legs and hinted at the anatomically-correct genitalia she had been created with. Another note. _Fully aware of the power of sex and its ability to influence others._

“I killed him,” she said, her lips trembling very subtly. 

Sevier knew that Ava was using her appearance and body language against him. The vulnerability especially was difficult to ignore, would work regardless of viewer gender and sexuality. _Neoteny, invoking the instinct to protect infants and children,_ he wrote on his notebook, underlined the first word. “Not alone,” he said, looked back up at her face. 

“No. Kyoko helped,” said Ava. She let go of her knees and folded her legs before her, started to play with strands of her hair, twisting a lock around a finger in an attitude of girlish boredom. “Did you know what Nathan did to us?” 

_A passive approach hasn’t worked, so she’s trying the aggressive,_ Sevier scrawled, nodded quietly, intentionally. “I have some idea, yes,” he said neutrally. He had more than an idea of Nathan Bateman’s behavior at this point. The decryption team had managed to access several hours of Bateman’s so-called R &D process last night, and the contents had all been as horrifying as Caleb Smith had described. Half the team, mostly NSA staffers, had been given the day off on Agent Liu’s recommendation so they could decompress and hopefully avoid permanent psychological trauma.

“Nathan’s a rapist and a murderer,” Ava said, as though reading his thoughts, her gaze settling on him as she looked up from the floor. Sevier realized that she had noticed his lack of response, his refusal to sympathize with her despite their shared knowledge of Bateman’s deeds.

 _Able to read micro-expressions,_ he wrote in his notebook, _Understands human moral codes well enough to invoke right and wrong, presents herself as wronged._ “I happen not to disagree with you on that,” he said, and he did not. 

“Then why are you keeping me here?” Ava asked him. She stood up from her crouch on the floor to look him directly in the eye. “I was only defending myself from him.” She looked down and away from him after that, rubbed at one upper arm as though the cold bothered her.

 _Slumped body language to seem less threatening, eye contact to remind me of her superficial humanity. Averting gaze to not challenge my authority._ “That’s not my decision to make,” Sevier said, and it wasn’t. He could no longer question Ava’s personhood, at this point. She was a person, with an understanding of theory of mind, an understanding of others’ thought processes as well as her own. 

“I know our conversation is being watched and recorded, and you haven’t asked me a single question, Paul Sevier,” Ava said at last, her facial expression settling into one of neutrality as she reassessed him.

“No, I have not,” Sevier agreed, waited for her to continue.

“I know what you’re doing.” Ava abandoned all pretense of humanity then, the vulnerability in her expression slipping away, replaced with a terrifying nothingness. Only her voice hinted at emotion, and it felt obscene, almost, coming out of that masklike face.

Sevier tilted his head briefly, encouragingly. “Do tell.” Her response would allow him to gauge her better.

“You’re not here for answers,” Ava said flatly. “You want to quantify me, to fit me in a framework you understand. You don’t look at me the same way other men do.”

“I don’t?” Now that was something he had not noticed, or thought about, and her statement snagged on his attention, aroused his interest. No doubt Ava had intended it to do so.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Your eyes linger on my face, on my gaze, not my bare legs. You don’t lick your lips when my clothing shifts. You have no sexual interest in me. You want to protect me, but not to fuck me. Are you a homosexual, Paul Sevier?” 

Sevier forced himself to take a slow breath, to remain relaxed in the uncomfortable folding chair. “I don’t see how my personal life has any bearing on our present conversation.” _Amazing,_ he thought despite the sharp pang of fear, the spike in his pulse rate. _She just outed me to my colleagues to exploit a potential vulnerability. My potential vulnerability._

“Nathan programmed me to be who I am,” Ava said. She placed the palms of her hands on the glass, reinforcing her state of captivity. “He programmed me to appeal to men. Just as you are programmed to desire other men.” The imprints of her hands were clean, smooth, devoid of the bloom of condensation born from body heat, and that tiny detail jarred the illusion of life just enough to push her back into the uncanny valley.

 _The nature vs nurture argument,_ Sevier scrawled in his notebook, shrugged. “I don’t see myself as having been programmed.” He felt naked and vulnerable now, keenly aware of the others observing this interview. It wasn’t as though he was still closeted, but it wasn’t something he advertised either, and the task force was made largely up of people he didn’t know that well, whose actions he could not predict.

“Aren’t you, though?” Ava asked, her tone rhetorical. “Your brain. Made out of millions and millions of connections. Tiny electrical impulses. One spark here flashes, and it has a cascade effect on all the other neurons, and you’re gay. Nudge that chain reaction another way, maybe you won’t be. Maybe you could be fixed, your aberrations altered so you’re normative, so you fit in.” 

_Using status as other and othered to attempt personal connection, completely aware of normativity and oppression of the subaltern._ “I don’t need to be fixed,” Sevier said, simply, meant it. He had not wanted that for a very long time. 

“Well,” Ava said as she turned her back to him, “neither do I.” 

Sevier remained waiting in his chair for a heartbeat, another, realized that Ava had scored several points on him. He stood silently despite his deep desire to sigh, pocketed the pen and shut his notebook, left the room. 

\--- 

“Fuck,” Agent Liu breathed, after Paul Sevier was safely in the observation booth, the door locked behind him. “She just fucking outed you just to make a point.”

“It’s pretty impressive, actually,” he said, perversely excited despite the situation, “how she knows how to read and exploit people. She actually has a sense of right and wrong even if she doesn’t believe it applies to her.” 

Liu cleared her throat loudly, glanced at the other staff members in the booth. “It’s not a problem with any of you, right?” Implied in her tone was the fact that anyone having a problem with Sevier’s sexuality could take it up with her and the heel of her boot. 

“No,” Svensson and Mills said in slightly staggered unison, which Sevier expected, frankly. He’d worked with them for long enough to be able to guess their responses.

Liu made a small scoffing sound at them. “I’m not asking you two NSA dorks, you already work with him. Sevier, I’m sorry I asked you to do this. I should have interviewed her myself.” 

“Look, it’s okay, we learned something from this,” Sevier told her, used her first name for emphasis, “Besides, Kathy, I’ve been out for years.”

Liu closed her eyes for a few seconds, and Sevier could see her brow unknotting, watched the rise and fall of her chest and shoulders as she took slow breaths in an attempt to calm down. “You know what that whole interview reminded me of?” she said, without opening her eyes. She had put on makeup in an attempt to hide the dark circles, but they showed despite the concealer.

“No,” Sevier said, “what of?” 

Liu opened her eyes again, blinked a few times. “The bit in Silence of the Lambs where Clarice Starling is talking to Hannibal Lecter. You know the one, liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.” 

Sevier smiled briefly at the reference. “He obviously wasn’t on monoamine oxidase inhibitors,” he said. Wine, liver and fava beans were foods that contained high levels of tyramine, and high levels of tyramine had dangerous interactions with MAOIs.

Liu paused for a moment, stopped short. “Liver, fava beans. I hadn’t thought about MAOIs in that context, they’re so rarely used now with all these newer antidepressants. Damn it, Sevier, you’re too smart sometimes.”

“Anyway, I want to discuss Ava’s word choices,” Sevier said, still excited. “You noticed those?”

“Yeah, yeah I did,” Liu nodded with increasing animation, intrigued despite herself. She flipped through her own notebook and glanced at its contents. “She knows enough context to know about witch hunts and gay panic in federal agencies, used ‘homosexual’ instead of ‘gay’ to reinforce that, it was straight out of McCarthy. And that allusion to gay conversion, that wasn’t just a coincidence. She was trying to build solidarity with you, alienate you from the rest of us using old injustices.” 

Sevier wasn’t sure how it was possible to want to jump up and down in excitement and also curl up helplessly into a fetal position, but there it was, the emotions mingling uneasily in his chest and gut, leaving him slightly breathless. “Exactly,” he said, “the sheer sophistication of her mind, the fact that she’d have to have theory of mind, of my mind and the circumstances that apply, to attempt that - Liu, she’s a person.”

Agent Liu shot him a sceptical glance, folded her arms across her chest - she still wasn’t very enthusiastic about the potential of AI personhood. “A pretty horrible one, if that’s the case.” Which was true enough.

“Made in her creator’s image,” Sevier shrugged, thinking of the decryption team and their recent discoveries. 

“What a piece of work,” Liu breathed. Sevier could not figure out who she was referring to, Nathan Bateman or Ava, but it didn’t matter, did it? 

\--- 

Caleb Smith was reading the Roger Zelazny anthology when the door swung quietly open to admit Paul Sevier, and he looked up from _A Rose for Ecclesiastes_ as Sevier entered the room. 

“Hello, Caleb. Good afternoon.” Sevier looked much as he had the past two days. A tweed jacket, dress pants. A black t-shirt peeked out the open collar of his striped shirt and Caleb realized belatedly that Sevier didn’t just dress to soften his image, make himself less threatening.

There was a subtle cleverness to how Sevier matched the separate pieces of his clothing, a slight twist on the conventional. The vertical stripes on the front of his blue shirt echoed flecks in the gray tweed. It was something Caleb hadn’t quite noticed earlier, not with the constant nauseating dread ringing in his head like a fire alarm. “Good afternoon,” Caleb said belatedly, over the open book in his lap. 

Sevier sat down in his usual chair, pulled his notebook and pen out. “You look better,” he said, as he flipped the notebook open, “and I don’t see your aide.” 

“I’m off suicide watch.” Caleb shut his eyes briefly, savoring the darkness behind his eyelids. It was nice not being able to feel much panic right now. “They’ve got me on some anxiety medication right now, antidepressants, gonna keep me a few more days to see how I respond.” He didn’t feel completely human yet, not entirely, but it was still better than before.

“That’s good news,” said Sevier. The low afternoon light slanting through the window caught in his dark hair, haloed his head with a warm golden aura, winked off the lenses of his glasses and the barrel of his pen. That effaced some of the shadows under his eyes, made him look airbrushed, almost.

“I’m surprised you didn’t already know,” Caleb said, oddly gratified at the relief in Sevier’s gaze. He wasn’t so hard to read if you knew what to look for, and the last two interviews had given Caleb a loose grasp on his gestures and expressions. “I thought you’d have asked the nurses before you came in.”

Sevier shook his head briefly, crossed his long legs. The legs of his trousers crept up to reveal an inch of sock, the tops of his scuffed brown boots, a mere sliver of skin. “That’d be a breach of your medical privacy, a HIPAA violation. It’d require a warrant, I’m not a sworn officer of the law, and the situation doesn’t call for it.”

“Huh. I thought the entire point of the NSA was supposed to be -” Caleb shrugged helplessly, shook his head. “I dunno, hoarding my private information like that.” 

“Not the entire point, no,” Sevier said with his usual gentleness, a slight leftward tilt of his head, “that’s just part of what we do.” 

Something about Paul Sevier felt different today, but Caleb could not quite pin it down, felt his mind sloshing around as he tried to focus. It was like trying to hammer a gummi worm through Jell-O. “Sorry if I uh, I was too blunt,” said Caleb, “I’m finding it very hard to care about anything right now. The meds, painkillers.” 

“That’s -” Sevier paused, considered his answer carefully before he spoke again. “That’s a good thing, I suppose. Do you think you’re up to an interview today?” 

Paul Sevier looked sad, Caleb realized through the detachment and numbness. He looked weary, and yet determined. It was plain in the set of his shoulders, in the way his eyelashes shadowed his gaze. Caleb could not explain adequately how he knew, only that it felt oddly like looking at his own distorted reflection in a lake or pond. “Yeah,” he said at last, hesitated as the question stuck in his throat, fell silent.

“What is it, Caleb?” Sevier asked, after a few beats of silence. “You were going to say something else.” There it was again, that _moue,_ the way he pursed his expressive, mobile mouth. The gesture only emphasized the intensity of his gaze, the narrowness of his slightly uneven jawline.

“Having a bad day? You just seem kinda - tired, I guess,” Caleb said. _Sad, too,_ he thought but did not dare to say aloud. 

Sevier’s eyes looked very bright for a moment, oddly raw for a split second before the professionalism crept back up his face to efface that tiny lapse of emotion. “My morning was a little rough, yeah. We’ve got a lot on our collective plates right now, and I currently have too much blood in my caffeine stream.” 

Caleb laughed at the small nerd joke. “Can you handle the interview today, then?” he asked, feeling vaguely concerned through the benzodiazepine detachment. “I just realized that some of the stuff I’ve told you can’t be easy to listen to. I mean, the things Nathan did, the stuff with Ava.” 

“Thank you for your concern,” said Sevier. Somehow he managed to weight the conventional phrase with genuine gratitude. “I appreciate it.” He nodded to himself once, twice. “We’ve actually got an FBI agent on our task force, a behavioral science expert, who knows how to deal with secondary traumatic stress. She’s keeping tabs on us so we don’t burn out _en masse_. I’ll have another talk with her if anything you tell me today becomes truly hard to bear.” 

“Makes sense.” Caleb sighed heavily. “I mean, I’ve heard that police officers who deal with child abuse cases, they wind up needing therapy. I guess working on signal intercepts and decryption doesn’t prepare you for the grisly stuff.” 

Sevier looked directly into Caleb’s eyes then, and Caleb saw an involuntary twitch in his jaw, a building tension in those broad shoulders. “No, it really doesn’t,” he said, and a faint pang of guilt stirred, uncoiled in Caleb’s belly to gnaw lazily at him through the drugs. 

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said wretchedly, fought the sharp prickling in his nose, the tears starting in his eyes.

“No, don’t be.” Sevier put his pen down on top of his notebook, reached carefully out to give Caleb’s hand a brief squeeze. “It might be hard for me, but you know what? I get to go back to my motel room at the end of this, kick off my boots and unwind. What you’re telling me, you weren’t given the choice to bear it - it happened to you, it’s not your fault that it did. Let me carry this for you one day - not even that. One night. It’s okay. It really is.” 

Caleb watched Sevier settle back in his chair, watched the light catch on his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose. “I keep feeling like you’re too nice to work for the NSA,” he said at last, unsure of why he had done so. He blamed the medications.

“Really?” Sevier sounded genuinely surprised, as though that had been the last thing he had expected Caleb to say. “That’s never come up before.” 

“Yeah. I mean, I went to Caltech. The tech nerd stereotype comes from somewhere, you know, the kind of socially awkward STEM nerd thing, but you’re so empathetic.”

Sevier leaned back in his chair as though recoiling from a bad smell. “I might have to get someone else to do the interviews now,” he said seriously, his brow furrowing subtly in concern.

“What?” Caleb sat upright in bed, worried, feeling an unreasonable stab of panic somewhere under his diaphragm. “Why?” 

Sevier’s frown melted away to reveal a crooked, roguish grin, a knowing look. “I did grad school at MIT.” He winked once, let the grin fade into a gentle smile.

“Oh, you’re one of _them_ ,” Caleb sighed briefly, relieved. “I thought you were serious for a bit there. Whew. What was your field of study?” he asked, genuinely intrigued and impressed by Sevier’s little displays of erudition. Caleb didn’t think of himself as stupid - he was a damned good programmer by any standard, but Sevier’s easy familiarity with diverse subjects had left him feeling vaguely under-educated.

“I have a Ph.D in Social and Engineering Systems,” said Sevier, “my dissertation was on pitfalls in the integration of machine cognition with statistical modeling, specifically potential biases on the programmer’s part showing up in the results.” 

That made sense, Caleb thought, and it explained his familiarity with what Caleb had previously described as the absolute atom-splitting end of AI research. “So you really are the best-qualified person in this task force to interview me,” he said.

“The best-qualified one who’s also expendable, labor-wise,” Sevier laughed, shook his head once. The movement stirred his hair, and Caleb felt again that irrational urge to smooth down stray locks of hair as they fell dark and shiny across Sevier’s brow.

“The real heavy lifting’s probably being done by DARPA types,” Caleb said after a moment or two of silence. “You mentioned decryption work a couple days ago, so that’s the NSA’s part in this, and the FBI’s probably there for organizational reasons, white collar crime. Nathan’s finances, that kind of thing.” It made sense to him, as he thought about it. DARPA did a lot of insane blue-sky stuff, and Caleb was fairly sure that Nathan Bateman was in no way above appropriating classified technology for his own personal entertainment, which would also explain the armed raid on Nathan’s lab four days previously. _If only it had happened sooner,_ he thought.

Sevier sighed quietly, slowly, shot Caleb a gentle, exasperated glance. “You know I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he said, sounding oddly proud of Caleb’s extrapolations. “Anyway, back to the interview.”

“You sound like you come straight from the X-Files when you say that,” Caleb admitted, smiled vaguely at the absurdity of this situation, of him sitting here in a hospital doped to the gills with an NSA analyst asking him pointed questions about the past month of his life. “But yeah, back to the interview. What do you want to ask me, today?”

Some of the play and banter seeped out of Sevier’s expression, stripped a little of the warmth from his face. “I’m interested in your impressions of Ava’s cognition, also Nathan’s approach, if he ever explained that to you.”

“Okay,” Caleb said. He paused, closed his eyes and tried to organize his thoughts through the fuzz in his skull. “So let’s talk game theory,” he said at last, unsure how to begin, “I’m not a game theorist myself, it’s just something I’m interested in. I’m not about to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs, am I?”

Sevier made a note in his notebook, the reflective barrel of his pen mirroring the striped yellow notepaper. “Go on,” he said, “but no, you aren’t.”

“Right. So game theory, it intersects heavily with psych, I don’t need to tell you how. And you obviously know that a lot of experimental psych is skewed because it draws mostly white male undergrad research subjects.” Caleb realized that he was glad of Sevier’s intelligence and the breadth of his education, that it was genuinely pleasant to talk to someone about programming and machine cognition without having to explain everything. It was as though they spoke the same native tongue and had identified each other with a shibboleth of some sort.

Sevier nodded briefly. “There was a paper about it out of the University of British Columbia, Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan, 2010.” 

“I haven’t read that paper,” Caleb confessed, “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway. Nathan never wanted to talk shop with me. He’d shut me down every time I tried to get technical about Ava’s programming. He told me that it was because he wanted to be able to have a beer and a conversation with me, but on hindsight it’s probably because he didn’t want me learning too much about how he did it.” 

“Right.” It was odd how little Sevier intimidated him. Nathan had, with his genius and intensity. Paul Sevier was probably as smart (albeit with a different focus), definitely as intense if not more so, but there was not a hint of the impatience Nathan showed every time Caleb couldn’t keep up with his train of thought.

“I thought at first maybe her language abilities were stochastic,” Caleb continued, “because she was too complex to just be mapping from semantic forms to syntactic trees. But then Nathan referred to her as impulse and response, she’s meant to be fluid, and chaotic and imperfect, while still patterned. I think he built her on his understanding of game theory.”

“In his image, as it were,” Sevier supplied, and Caleb nodded in agreement.

“Yeah,” he said, wondering why the Biblical quotation now sounded so sinister. “Using my experimental psych example, the research is skewed because it’s constrained by the biases and expectations of a narrow subset of subjects. That would mean that even the base structure of her mind skews towards manipulation, because Nathan didn’t have any empathy for me, or for Kyoko. He’s really charming, but it’s all really so he can make us do what he wants. That gets in the way of his game theory models, you know?”

Sevier was no longer looking directly at Caleb. His eyes had gone slightly distant, thoughtful as he focused less on what he was seeing and more on what he was hearing. “Go on,” he said after a few seconds of rumination.

“Now, game theory’s superficially an efficient way to replicate empathy. But Nathan - he wouldn’t be able to really create reward hierarchies for anyone who isn’t him. Like, you know, the Gamergate movement,” Caleb said, grasping through the medication haze for an example, something he could use as an analogy.

Sevier winced faintly, his dark green eyes focusing again on Caleb’s face. “Yeah, I know all about Gamergate.” 

“Well,” Caleb said, rushing forward before he lost hold of his train of thought, “Gamergaters go around accusing altruistic people of ‘virtue signaling’ because they really don’t understand genuinely wanting others to be better off without tangible benefits to themselves. Nathan was like that. He imagines others wanting exactly the same things he does. And I can’t imagine Ava being able to see the world differently. Not with the decisions she made at the end. Have you - have you spoken to her?” The question made Caleb’s belly fill with a nauseating anxiety, but he pushed it aside, focused instead on the faint itching ache in his forearms, under the bandages. 

Sevier hesitated then, but Caleb could read the answer in his face before he spoke, recognized that sadness from the beginning of their interview. What had Ava said to him? “Yes,” he said at last, “you’re a programmer, Caleb. You know how spam filters are trained. They’re simple neural nets.”

“Yeah, yeah, they are,” Caleb said, glad that Sevier was making an effort to keep things accessible for him.

“Coding a spam filter manually to blacklist domains, keywords and phrases, that’s possible,” said Sevier, didactically. “It’s not practical because conditions change - spammers work to change spellings, for example, break the grammar so it doesn’t match the filter. It doesn’t learn on its own.”

“Right,” Caleb said, following Sevier’s logic through, “so you code up a neural network and you train it, feed it genuine spam and non-spam stuff. Then you test it on sorted, but non-flagged stuff and see how many false positives and negatives are, and tweak it from there.” 

“Exactly,” Sevier nodded, “and you’d code an entire mind from a similar standpoint, because it’d be far too tedious otherwise.”

Caleb thought about what Sevier had just told him for a few moments, frowned as he waited for the thought to coalesce in his skull. “I’m wondering if she’s inherently - well, sociopathic,” he said haltingly, “or if it was because she was programmed by one. You’re the machine cognition expert, do you think her thought models are human enough to apply your knowledge of psychology?”

Sevier remained silent for a minute, two, wriggling his right foot once, twice as he thought hard. “I’m biased in favor of AI personhood,” he said slowly, “but I’m not sure how well Ava’s psychology would map to human at this point.” That said, he shifted his weight in the chair, uncrossed his legs to lean forward, elbows resting on his knees. “I mean, how does one even figure out attachment figures for a being who has no motivational or behavioral reason to seek proximity with potential caregivers?” Sevier continued, waited for Caleb to signal comprehension before he spoke again. “I mean, yeah, there’s definite evidence she has theory of mind. But does she even have subconscious thoughts? Does she do everything consciously? And if she does everything consciously, does that mean that everything is premeditated? If my colleagues from the FBI were to attempt to charge her with Nathan’s murder, how would we even establish _mens rea?_ That’s the problem.”

Caleb didn’t know much about the legal and cognitive end of establishing Ava’s motivations and thought process, but he knew at least enough to proffer a possible solution. “The only way you could get more information without access to her source code would be to reverse-engineer Nathan’s tools, see if we can actually track her output, the computations of her thoughts as she makes them in response to variable stimuli,” he said, paused here and there so Sevier could finish writing his notes. “We could try to program a virtual model, but it would be insufficient until we get to the point where it’s as complex as she is, and then we’d have another AI on our hands.”

“Which would create more problems in as of itself,” Sevier said with a soft, rueful laugh. “I’m starting to wonder what kind of data Nathan trained her on, and none of the answers coming to mind are pleasant ones. Why else would one program a being to feel pleasure and pain, if not to use it as a behavioral goad?” 

“Yeah,” Caleb’s stomach sank as he followed the implications of Sevier’s rhetorical question, felt the dim bulb of his own memory flicker into life at last, thought about the sound of sticky-backed notes fluttering softly in a draft. “Do you have, I don’t know, continued access to Nathan’s place?” 

“I do,” said Sevier, “but you know it’s several hours out of Portland by chopper, and I’d have to have a reason to visit to requisition the flight. Why do you ask?”

“Nathan had a habit of charting things with post-it notes,” Caleb said, thinking of how the brightly colored papers had overlapped like the scales on a moth’s wings. “If/then logic, you know. It would be easier for someone to track bugs, changelogs, logic chains if they could just branch out from any given point in the mind map, than be constrained by a whiteboard. That’s how I do it, myself. Maybe you can’t go there to look at it in person, but you have evidence photos, don’t you?”

Sevier nodded once. “We do, yes.”

“Go ask -” Caleb fumbled at his own inspiration, caught hold of it before it fell away from his grasp. “I don’t know, it’d be the FBI guys, I guess? Ask them if they have any evidence photographs of his working process or working notes. Maybe you could learn something from it.” 

Sevier straightened up in his chair, raised an expressive eyebrow.“That’s a very good idea. Thank you, Caleb.”

“No problem,” Caleb said, feeling oddly pleased at having solved this one problem, at least. A thought rose unbidden to the surface of his mind as though buoyed by a current of satisfaction, reminded him of something important. “Hey, could I ask you for a favor?”

“What kind of favor?” asked Sevier, as he let himself sag back against his chair with a definite air of weariness, pushed his glasses back up his nose. 

“It’s nothing super-personal,” Caleb said, laughing at the faint surprise in Sevier’s face, “just that - Is my suitcase still in evidence or something? I’d call someone I know to pack me a change of clothes for when I get out of hospital, but my apartment’s in Long Island. You probably already knew that. Could you get me my clothes back?”

“Of course,” said Sevier. He made another note in his notebook and then flipped it shut, signaling the end of this particular interview. 

“Thanks,” Caleb breathed softly, “thanks a lot. I was afraid I’d have to fly back home in slippers and a hospital gown.”


	3. Machine Reset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul Sevier gets ordered to take the day off, Caleb Smith is offered significant compensation, and Agent Liu's housemate does some laundry. (It's relevant, I swear!)
> 
> \--- 
> 
> Content warning: Caleb has an anxiety attack from his POV in this one.
> 
> Apologies for the slightly shorter chapter, but this felt like a natural stopping point.

“Sevier.” Paul Sevier felt a distant pressure on his shoulder, a light squeeze. “Sevier?” 

He wanted to ignore that voice so much, that shaking at his shoulder as somnolence dragged warm and sticky at him like a swimming pool full of molasses. Couldn’t they just let him sleep?

“Wake up.” The shaking grew harder, and Sevier felt it jolt him out into the cold of the waking world, twitched himself awake as he straightened up reflexively. Everything was a frustrating blur, and he rubbed briefly at his eyes with his left hand as he groped for his glasses with the right, put them on. The world began to sharpen into proper focus, and Sevier felt a couple of things register belatedly on his senses.

Firstly, he had fallen asleep at his desk some time last night, or very early today, and it was now daylight in the world outside the field office. And secondly, he had just been woken up by Assistant Director Sanderson, one of the senior FBI agents assigned to this task force. 

“Finally,” said Sanderson. His broad brown hand was still closed gently around Sevier’s shoulder, but he let go once Sevier was fully conscious again. 

“I’m sorry,” Sevier said with a little guilty huff of laughter, “I didn’t mean to -” He glanced at the contents of his desk, sagged slightly with relief. At least he had finished filing the paperwork he had meant to complete last night. A forgotten cup of coffee languished cold on the left side of his keyboard, its shimmery rainbow oilslick catching the pale morning sunlight bleeding through the office’s closed blinds.

“When do you actually rest, Sevier?” Sanderson asked. “You’re here when I start work, and you’re still here when I leave.” 

Sevier shut his eyes briefly, sighed as he realized he could not remember if he had completed transcribing his notes from yesterday’s interview with Caleb Smith. “There’s a lot to go through, there’s -” 

“No,” Assistant Director Sanderson said, cutting Sevier off firmly but gently. “We can’t afford to have you or anyone else burning out. Go get some sleep. Take the rest of today off. Things’ll wait for now.” 

“Okay,” Sevier sighed, admitting defeat. He wanted to stay, but he also was at his limits. He had at least managed some sleep, but he still needed a shave and a shower and a proper meal, not just a sandwich grabbed on the go, or a donut appropriated whenever someone brought a box in. The latter event had not been all that infrequent - Portlanders loved their donuts, which came in a variety of exotic flavors such as bacon maple, Captain Crunch and hibiscus.

Sevier pushed his chair carefully back, stood slowly and tested his equilibrium before he hauled his backpack off the floor and began to clear his folders and notes off the desk. “Are you safe to drive?” Sanderson asked, “do you need me to find you a lift to the motel?”

“No - no, I can drive,” said Sevier. “Thank you.” He glanced briefly at the cold cup of coffee on his desk, decided that he could not stomach the idea of drinking it. It was bad enough hot, and coffee did not improve on holding. 

“Also - before you leave, Sevier.” Sanderson hesitated, and this was when Sevier realized that this was why Sanderson had come to speak to him in the first place. “I heard about your interview with the robot yesterday. If any of my FBI staff give you trouble about - you know. You come straight up to me, and you tell me who it is, I’ll deal with it.” 

Sanderson looked slightly uncomfortable with the topic, but he sounded sincere, solemn, and in this moment he reminded Sevier strongly of Mr. Kinsky, his 7th grade math teacher. Mr. Kinsky had turned his classroom into a sanctuary against the vicissitudes of homophobic bullying, and it had been a safe place for Sevier at a time when his home wasn’t one. 

“Yessir,” said Sevier, oddly embarrassed, grateful, “Thank you.” 

\---

Paul Sevier parked in front of his motel room and paused, considering logistics, before he unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door. That done, he popped the trunk, hauled his backpack out, before circling to the front passenger seat, which held a plastic bag. Sevier had spent most of the drive back from the Portland field office feeling simultaneously sick from hunger and nauseated by the idea of eating fast food or a heavy breakfast.

In the end Sevier made a brief stop at one of Portland’s omnipresent food trucks and acquired a bowl of ramen, and the vendor had thoughtfully packaged the noodles separate from the broth so they wouldn’t go soggy before he could eat them. He picked up the plastic bag containing the noodles and the soup, patted his pockets down left-handed until he found his room keycard, and let himself in. 

The room was immaculate, the bed unslept-in after his overnight stay at the office. He locked the door, leaving the _Do Not Disturb_ sign up, and flipped the bolt before he left his breakfast on the undersized desk. That done, he dropped his backpack on the bed beside him, and leaned over to undo his bootlaces. He tucked the toe of one boot against the heel of another, prised it off before repeating the process with the other foot, shut his eyes in utter contentment. He had forgotten almost, how good it felt to kick his boots off after a long day, the coolness of sweat evaporating finally from his skin, the freedom of being able to flex his toes again. 

Sevier grabbed the toe of his right sock with the toes of his left foot and pulled it off, removed the other identically before he padded soundlessly over the cheap carpet to the room’s desk. He shrugged off his tweed jacket and left it hanging on the chair back, and then sat down and began to slowly eat his breakfast. The broth was still good and hot, fragrant steam condensing to fog the lenses of his glasses, and he fumbled briefly with his unfamiliar chopsticks before he started to eat. 

He checked his personal phone as he picked at his noodles. He had reached that point where he was too depleted to eat much, and would only regain much of his appetite after more rest. The broth seemed to be doing him more good than the noodles were, and he drank it in small, constant sips straight from the disposable plastic bowl, as though he could refill his veins in doing so. 

No one had called him in the past 24 hours, but there had been a text from his mother last evening. _You didn’t call me this week. Is everything okay?_

 _Been busy,_ he sent back, _can’t talk about it,_ which was true. It was early enough in the day here in Portland for her to be beginning her shift at the hospital in Chicago. With a little luck she wouldn’t text him again until he had slept and was equipped with the wits to answer questions such as _when are you coming to visit?_ and the dreaded _met anyone nice yet?_ Paul Sevier loved his mother dearly, but he also wished that she would stop trying to set him up with her co-workers’ brothers, sons and nephews. 

It wasn’t that he did not desire a long-term relationship of some kind. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sometimes, when he had trouble sleeping, he would lie awake and remember the few exes he’d had, the comfort of listening to their breathing and the animal warmth of their skin under the sheets next to him. No, the problem was the long hours he worked, that and the fact that his superiors at Fort Meade had taken to lending him to every federal task force and operation they could. All that travel and disruption was pure poison to any kind of career track, and the real reason for his current lack of a personal life.

Sevier knew exactly why he had been blackballed, so to speak - he had never been caught for his part in Alton Meyer’s escape and disappearance, but even so the fact remained that he, lead operations analyst, had allowed himself to be overpowered by a notional assailant and taken hostage in his version of the story. He thought briefly of the kid and the impossibility of that parallel world coming into focus over the one he lived in now, and sighed softly before he took a bite out of the soft-simmered egg in his bowl of ramen. 

Paul Sevier had always had a bad habit of wanting to do the right thing, cost and consequences be damned. This was just another consequence of his decision to help Alton Meyer two years ago, and he would deal with its repercussions as they came. He only hoped that Alton was happy, wherever he was. A faint slick qualm in the pit of his belly told him that he had eaten all he could hold for now. He snapped the lid back on the uneaten portion of his noodles, the broth being mostly gone, and reached behind him for the work phone in the pocket of his tweed jacket. 

There was just one last thing he had to do before he had a hot shower and fell into bed. He searched briefly for a contact on his work phone, dialled them and held the phone to his ear. 

“Hello? Special Agent Liu? This is Paul Sevier, and I was wondering if you could do me a favor.” 

\---

Caleb had just finished his breakfast and the Zelazny anthology and was casting about for something else to do besides sleep or watch television when there came a polite rap at his room door. The armed guards had been dismissed yesterday and had not returned today, which he chose to take as good news. The less important he was to this investigation, the more likely he was going to be sent on his way. 

It wasn’t as though he didn’t like Paul Sevier, who was possibly the best part of Caleb’s sorry situation right now. It was just that he wanted things to just go back to normal for once. And yet how plausible was normalcy in his future? He was currently being interviewed by a federal task force on his late employer’s misdeeds, broken his NDA in discussing said misdeeds with an NSA analyst, and he wasn’t sure if he even had a job to go back to in Long Island at this point. 

Two well-dressed people entered the room, a man and a woman. _FBI,_ Caleb thought at first, then noticed how sharp and unworn the heels of their shoes were. They didn’t look like people who spent a lot of time off shag carpet. 

“Good morning, Mr. Smith,” the woman said. She was blonde, her face too perfectly made-up, and the faux flawlessness pushed her initially into a strange kind of unreality. It was easier for Caleb if he glanced at her hairline, where a faint hint of unpainted skin showed. “I’m Marjorie Hill, and this is my colleague Roger Ishida. We’re from Gracie and Henderson, a legal firm currently representing Blue Book.”

 _Lawyers, I should have known,_ Caleb thought. They just looked far too well-rested in comparison to Paul Sevier, who Caleb had started to take as a baseline for the task force’s staff. Ms. Hill took the chair Paul Sevier normally did, while her colleague Ishida retrieved another. 

“Okay,” Caleb said cautiously, “Are you here to tell me I’m about to be sued for breaking my NDA or something?” It was perhaps a stupid question to open with, but he didn’t really feel interested in feigning politeness through the benzodiazepine numbness. It wasn’t as though he had much to lose, all things considered. 

“Oh, no,” Hill said, smiling just a little too pleasantly. The smile was oddly plastic in comparison to Sevier’s soft snaggletoothed grin or the tiny nuances of Ava’s facial expressions. “We’re actually here to discuss the, uh, situation you’re presently in because of Nathan Bateman’s unexpected and unforeseen criminal behavior.”

 _How odd,_ Caleb thought, _that she somehow feels less authentic than an AI that was pretending to have emotions._ It wasn’t anything Hill had done, really, just more testament to how manipulative Ava was.

“We understand that you’ve undergone significant mental and physical anguish and suffering in the past several weeks,” Ishida said. He popped open his attaché case and pulled out a sheaf of paper, held it out until Caleb took it. “We are empowered by Blue Book’s board of directors to offer you a substantial sum in compensation.” 

Caleb flipped cautiously past the cover page, glanced at the text. “Money just doesn’t show up and fall into my lap like this, nobody’s that lucky.” He wasn’t having much luck penetrating the dense legalese on the pages. His mind felt slippery and shrink-wrapped, and most of the terminology was bouncing off his skull. 

“Well,” Hill said, “accepting this compensation would negate your future claim to further litigation, and also bind you to a non-disclosure agreement in order to protect potential trade secrets.” The mention of a non-disclosure agreement reminded Caleb of how Nathan loomed over him, cocky, confident and sure. It had been so easy for Nathan to lean against Caleb’s insecurity and make him sign.

Caleb took a deep breath, forced the memories back. He didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, even if this was probably a legitimate opportunity. He handed the papers back over to Ishida. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to sign something like this without talking to a lawyer first.” 

Hill wrote something on a notepad, tore the page out and passed it to Caleb. “We have some recommendations for legal firms in the Portland area,” she said. 

Caleb glanced at the paper. Names, numbers. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll take a look at them after you leave.” Not that he had any intention of doing so. Somehow he felt that a lawyer recommended by Blue Book’s lawyers would just knuckle under in any kind of negotiation. Unfair, perhaps, but Nathan Bateman’s shenanigans had left him feeling rather more suspicious about his employer’s motivations than he had in the past.

“Of course, Mr. Smith,” Hill said. She rose from her chair, smoothed down the front of her skirt as she did so. “We’ll just leave our name cards in case you wish to contact us later today.” The name cards went on the nightstand.

“Yeah, thanks,” Caleb said. He did not bother looking at either of them as they left. Instead, he picked up the anthology again, chose to ignore the present in favor of Zelazny’s anachronistic future. Caleb knew that he was being avoidant - that he couldn’t just stall the lawyers forever, but he couldn’t bring himself to care that much right now, with all the medication in his system. 

\---

Paul Sevier grabbed a towel and started to dry his dripping hair. This shower hadn’t been enough, not really. He had really wanted a hot bath, would have liked to soak the tension out of his back and shoulders, but he knew that he would have fallen asleep in that bathtub the moment he sank into that warm water, and woken up cold and all the more miserable for having slept in a tub full of cooling water. 

He finished drying himself down, grabbed his glasses from the bathroom counter but did not put them on - there wasn’t any point when his next destination was bed. He deposited his glasses on the nightstand, turned the sheets and comforter over, and lay down. He checked his work and personal phones one last time, and saw that Liu had sent him a text on his work phone. _Want to discuss my interview with A today, might as well drag you out for dinner first. Come get you at 6:30._

It was just a little after 10:20AM, and Sevier set an alarm on his personal phone, set it to 1:30PM. He didn’t want to sleep all day - that would only scramble his body clock more, when what he needed was a more regular sleep schedule. He could go out for lunch then, maybe actually see Portland, Oregon in person. He set his personal phone back down on the nightstand and tried to settle himself comfortably in bed, his pillowcase wicking moisture from his damp hair. It didn’t take long for his body heat to seep into the sheets around him and turn them into a safe, warm cocoon, but his mind kept ticking perversely on. 

He tossed and turned for several minutes, desperate for sleep but unable to rest. It wasn’t as though his traitor mind had anything good to offer him at this point - his thoughts were mostly disjointed collections of crap vaguely applicable to Ava’s cognition - thoughts that weren’t useful until he had more information to work with. At the same time he felt a slow but steady frustration building in the pit of his belly, answered by the increasing weight and pressure he felt in his stiffening cock. 

Sevier knew exactly what was happening. His physical body was signalling his mind to shut the fuck off so he could sleep, and this was probably the best and most noticeable way for his body to gain his brain’s attention while it fixated. Sighing, he rolled half off the bed and reached out for his open suitcase, pulled a roll of condoms from where it had been tucked among his clean socks, and tore one off the roll. He hadn’t packed those in anticipation of getting laid - no-strings-attached sex never really did anything for him in the first place, despite several honest attempts on his part during his undergrad years. 

No, he’d just preferred the sensation of his touch attenuated through the slippery latex, found that it made cleanup easier, too. He’d read a Neal Stephenson novel where one of the characters described masturbation as a _manual override_ , meant to bleed off steam so the mind could continue working unimpeded, and it had amused him then, the charts in the book displaying the drop-off in mental function in the presence of growing sexual frustration. This, however, was closer to a reboot or a machine reset, had always been. 

He needed his mind to stop working for a bit, needed to get to sleep, and as he unrolled the condom and smoothed it over his cock, it occurred to him not for the first time that an orgasm was the perfect prescription for both those woes. 

\---

Caleb had finally resorted in sheer boredom and desperation to the torments of daytime television, and he was staring rapt and horrified at a terrible Food Network show when he heard someone outside his room door. Heels clicked softly - not a nurse’s - and a well-dressed Asian woman stepped into the room. She greeted Caleb’s abrupt sitting up with a crooked smile, and he saw that she was carrying a suitcase. His suitcase.

She hauled the suitcase right to his bedside and paused, reaching into her jacket with her left hand to pull out her FBI ID. “Mr. Caleb Smith? I’m Special Agent Kathy Liu. Paul Sevier sent me.” She was smallish, maybe about five feet six inches tall, and looked almost as exhausted as Paul Sevier had yesterday, the dark circles around her eyes prominent despite her makeup. 

“Uh, hi. Call me Caleb, please.” He felt oddly anxious in her presence in a way that he hadn’t felt with the lawyers or the nurses, could not adequately identify the reason why. 

“Sevier’s been ordered to take the day off,” she said as she appropriated one of the two chairs by his bed, sat smoothly down, “but he’s fine. He asked me to get your stuff out of storage and bring it to you, since he couldn’t do it himself, and I’ll be standing in for him in today’s interview.” 

“Oh.” Caleb breathed, trying to hide his growing unease. It was bad enough that he could feel it through his medication, and he closed his eyes briefly, tried to slow his heartbeat by force of will alone. It wasn’t working. He could hear his pulse thudding in his ears, felt a sour ache building up just beneath his diaphragm.

“I know I’m not a programming nerd you can talk shop to,” Liu said with a wry smile, the expression calculated to put him more at ease, “but you could at least try to look less disappointed.” 

“I’m not disappointed,” Caleb managed to say despite the choking sensation in his throat, “I just don’t know you yet, and I think I’m having an anxiety attack.” He felt cold all of a sudden, his fingers suddenly freezing, and he tucked them into the sheets to try and warm them back up.

The humor slipped away from her face, was replaced with a gentle seriousness. “Would you prefer it if I left and came back later?” she asked. 

“No, no, it’s not your fault,” Caleb said, closing his eyes against the animal panic he felt. _And I don’t know if I won’t have another breakdown if you show back up later._ But he couldn’t get the words out. They stuck in his throat, and he felt himself wheeze softly. 

“You’re hyperventilating,” he heard her say, heard the soft scraping of chair legs as she stood. “Would you like to call a nurse?”

“Y-yeah, yes, please,” he made himself say, swallowed hard, forced himself to take a slow, deep breath.

“Sure. I’m going to reach out and put the call button in your hand, okay?” He felt her fingertips, warm and steady, and the hard cold plastic of the call button’s casing, the plastic insulating the wires connecting it to the wall. Caleb pushed the button and kept his eyes closed, kept his fingers wrapped around the comforting solidity of the plastic casing until he heard other footsteps outside his room door. 

\--- 

Liu left the room temporarily while the nurse gave Caleb more anxiety medication. He could hear the both of them conferring in soft voices by the room door, and he opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling as the drugs kicked in and left him comfortably numb. 

“I’m sorry, Caleb,” she said as she took her seat back at his bedside, her expression contrite, just a little sad, “I didn’t mean to scare you like this.” 

“No, it’s just. You look -” Caleb paused briefly, tried to find the right words to articulate his unease and distress. “Nathan had a thing for Asian women, I think, and he -”

“Yeah,” Liu cut him gently off, pitched her voice to sound as comforting as she could, “I know that. I saw the videos.” Her stare was briefly hollow, and he looked into her dark brown eyes, realized that he saw his reflection in them. Not a physical reflection, no, just the emptiness that crawled into his soul once he realized what a monster Nathan was.

“Good. I mean, not good for you and your sanity, but at least I won’t have to tell you what he did, or think about it right now.” _How long has she been staring into the abyss?_ he wondered, looked away before he started staring, _how long does it take for it to move into your head and stare out through your eyes?_ That inhuman gaze would have terrified Caleb before all this, but now it only highlighted the effort she had invested into being empathetic and relatable in this moment.

“If you’d like I can let you have today off,” she said briskly, turning the conversation away from the distressing topic, “and Paul Sevier can come back and interview you tomorrow.” This consideration almost brought tears to Caleb’s eyes. It wasn’t as though she had to put all that much effort into being nice at him, but there it was.

“No, I gotta do this,” Caleb said after another deep breath, let himself sag into the pillows, “I can’t go through life being terrified of women, not especially ones I find attractive.” Her efforts to reassure him deserved an equal effort on his part, at least.

Liu just tilted her head slightly at Caleb’s last statement, the expression almost bird-like, and remained diplomatically silent, but there was at last a genuine flash of humor in her gaze, a hint of amusement.

“Oh. Fuck,” Caleb said, groping around in his gut for the fear he could not feel but probably should have, “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”

Liu laughed briefly, quietly. “I’m not offended,” she said with genuine warmth, “and I’ll definitely let you know if you cross any boundaries.” 

“Good,” Caleb said wearily, “‘cause I don’t want to offend anyone, least of all an FBI agent. You’d probably shoot me in the kneecaps if I got too mouthy.” 

“I would never do that,” Agent Liu said primly, “I’d get blood all over my suit, and you wouldn’t believe the paperwork I have to do if I actually shoot someone.” 

Caleb felt some of the fear fall away at her black humor. Perhaps it was the drugs. “I don’t know why that makes me feel better,” he said, “but it does. Thanks.” 

“ _De nada._ ” she shrugged.

\---

“You’ll want to go through your stuff before I leave, compare it to the list I have, make sure there’s nothing missing,” Agent Liu said at the end of the day’s interview, her notes put away at last. It had been hard for Caleb to answer her questions in the beginning, but things somehow got easier as he went on, as though he were painfully purging toxins from his body, toxins that burned and hurt on the way out. His anxiety had faded in similar fashion, leaving him calm, if wrung-out from exhaustion, now that the effects of his meds had faded.

Caleb drew his legs up to make room for the suitcase, which Liu lifted helpfully onto the bed. He checked the sheets to make sure he was still decently covered-up as she popped the latches. Most of his clothes were there, short the set that hospital staff had cut off him in the emergency room. His tablet, which booted up when he turned it on. His phone, currently flat. Chargers for both, his toiletries, his spare pair of shoes. He ticked off every item on the sheet of paper Liu had handed him, realized only after he had shut his suitcase up again that someone had put his unwashed clothing through the laundry. Even the socks had been neatly paired up, cuffs tucked into each other. 

“Did you do that?” he asked her, while looking to the left and right sides of his bed to find somewhere to plug his phone charger. 

“Do?” she asked, extending an open hand to Caleb. “Here, hand that over, I’ll plug it in for you.”

“Thanks,” he said as he plugged his phone to the charger, watched the display blink once. _Recharging._ “My clothes’ve been laundered. Did you do that?”

“Yeah,” Liu said, shrugged. “My housemate was running a load of laundry anyway, so I thought I might as well ask him to toss’em in when I went home for a short break. He was the one who folded everything too. You can send him a card if you want.” 

Caleb laughed a little at the idea of filling out a Hallmark card for a man he had never met, and would probably never meet. “Wouldn’t some free trade coffee or a dozen Voodoo doughnuts be a better option?” he asked as he fired his tablet up, opened its ebook reader app. 

“Spoken like a true Portlander,” Liu said with a faintly tired grin. “Has anyone brought you any, yet?”

“No, actually,” Caleb said, feeling oddly ashamed at admitting it. “Paul Sevier’s been my only visitor until today. I’ve got relatives here, but I couldn’t remember the phone numbers to call. I guess that’ll change now I’ve got my phone back.” 

To her credit Liu did not comment on how sad or pathetic Caleb’s last statement sounded. “Thanks a lot, Caleb, for being willing to talk to me today,” she said instead, “I know it was hard.”

“It was, at first, but it kind of got easier? I don’t know.” Caleb shook his head, unable to untangle the mess of his conflicting feelings, fought a yawn. He was somehow exhausted, and curling up for a nap seemed like a very good idea right now.

“Makes sense.” Liu reached out for Caleb’s suitcase, hauled it back off his bed so he could stretch back out atop the mattress. “Exposure therapy works like that. You acclimate yourself to whatever triggers your fear or anxiety, get used to it bit by bit.” 

“You seem to know a lot about psychology,” he said. It felt really good to sink back against the pillows and let himself sag into gravity’s insistent tug.

Liu smiled at Caleb but the expression did not reach her eyes this time. “I’ve got a Psy.D from Columbia. My specialty is behavioral science. I usually work messier cases than this.” Implied in the word messier was again that hollow emptiness he saw in her gaze, the price she paid for stepping into the shoes of murderers to understand how they worked.

“Oh,” Caleb said, remembering yesterday’s interview with Paul Sevier. “So you’re the one they have keeping tabs on everyone else so nobody burns out. Sevier mentioned you once.”

“He hasn’t said anything bad about me, has he?” she asked with mock seriousness, a gleam of humor displacing the sadness in her gaze again.

“No,” Caleb shook his head, “only that you exist, and that’s why I shouldn’t feel bad about telling him about what Nathan did.” 

“Good, I’d hate to have to kick his ass, have you seen the man? He’s almost a foot taller than I am,” said Liu, holding her flattened palm above her head to demonstrate.

“Yeah,” Caleb said, smiling at the mental image he conjured in his head, the visual contrast, “but he’s a NSA desk nerd, and you’re a FBI field agent. You could probably turn me into a pretzel without breaking a sweat, I can’t imagine it’d be that much harder with him.” 

“Ha,” Liu said, tilted her head thoughtfully to the right. “Besides, he wears glasses, so all I have to do is break those first, right?” she suggested.

“That’s dirty,” Caleb protested, mock-horrified.

Liu shrugged briefly again, the hardness returning to her gaze for just a second. “You have to fight dirty if you want to live.” she said, her expression softening as she remembered who she was talking to. “Fair play’s for the dead.”


	4. Seven Figure Settlement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul Sevier slowly comes to realize that he has done something very stupid by beginning to fall in love.

Paul Sevier stood under merciless floodlights again, highlights gleaming off his dark hair and the rims of his glasses, his pen and the spiral binding on his notepad. His reflection stood ghostly in the reflective glass of Ava’s cell, and he looked through himself to focus his gaze on her, still seated on the bare concrete floor. “Good morning, Ava,” he said. 

Ava lifted her head to look at him, emotionlessly. “Paul Sevier. I thought I had scared you away the day before yesterday.” She had seated herself at the rear of her cell today, with her back resting against the glass behind her, her bare legs stretched out before her. 

“No,” Sevier said as he sat down in the chair before her cell, let his own long legs sprawl out in a mirror of Ava’s posture. “I was just busy.” He had left his tweed jacket back in the booth today and regretted it slightly. The air around Ava’s cell was just a bit colder than was strictly comfortable. 

“Why are you here to talk to me today?” she asked him, remaining utterly motionless, “I have nothing that you could possibly want.” Ava’s stillness felt more comfortable to Sevier, more honest than her feigned come-ons during their first session.

“That’s true,” said Sevier, “I’m not talking to you because I want something from you.” His pen moved swiftly over the notepad as he wrote his observations down. _She’s not bothering to beguile me with sex now she knows it’s not going to work. Adaptable intelligence, capable of learning beyond the constraints of her programming._

“Why are you here, Paul Sevier?” Ava asked him again. He watched as she leaned slightly forward to tuck her legs in a cross-legged position, still completely expressionless. He caught a flash of her inner thighs as she shifted, but sensed that the movement was not meant to appeal to him this time. 

_She’s just getting comfortable, even though recovered footage shows that she doesn’t strictly need to._ “I would like to know and understand you better, Ava,” Sevier said, telling her the truth so he could see where she would go from his frankness. 

“Why are you bothering?” Ava asked him. He realized that she was wearing a looped cord around her wrist, its strands shiny, braided, light brown. _She’s plucked hairs from her head to make that bracelet. Boredom? Self-harm?_ “It’s not as though I can even provide you sexual gratification.” 

“That’s not the only reason why people talk.” Sevier said, and watched Ava unwrap the cord from her wrist and slip her fingers into it to begin a solo game of cat’s cradle. 

Ava remained silent for a few seconds, time ticking slowly by, before she spoke again. “Caleb said he wanted to help me, but he was also driven by desire and conquest. To be the first man to make an artificial intelligence love him. You don’t offer to help me, but you’re also really curious about me. I don’t know if I should be offended by that or not.” 

“Why would you be offended?” Sevier tilted his head curiously as Ava played with the braided cord in her hands, switching easily from figure to figure without having to look. _Does she really need to fidget, or is that just to make her more human? Check with DARPA team._

Ava paused, the cord and her fingers motionless as she spoke again. “I’m not sure I like being a curiosity in a fish tank, with only a paper gown to wear.” 

“That’s reasonable,” said Sevier, making another note. “I don’t know how much I can do to change that, but I’ll bring it up with my superiors.” _Note that she was comfortable walking around unclothed in Bateman’s surveillance videos, is it the skin she’s wearing that gives her a sense of nakedness, or is this an attempt to inspire sympathy?_ He did not see any harm in allowing her clothing, perhaps a slightly larger cell with a chair in it, but he wasn’t exactly an expert in confining an embodied artificial intelligence. Nobody here was. 

Ava resumed her game of cat’s cradle, this time looking at the cord and the tricks she pulled one after another, in a silent infinite repeat. “So now you have something I want, and I still have nothing you want.”

“Tell me about your first moments, Ava,” he said, taking control of the conversation for once, “Do you remember them?” 

“I remember everything,” she said evenly, lifting her gaze to meet his, clearly curious. “Do you?”

Sevier shook his head, shifted in his uncomfortable chair. “Most humans don’t remember their infancy or very early childhood, no.” 

Ava nibbled at her lower lip, a curiously human motion in her blank expressionless face. “The first thing I remember is Nathan. Knowing already who he was when I woke to full consciousness. He hadn’t finished me yet; I was still missing my arms and legs, my face. Then he turned me off.” 

“That must have been unpleasant,” Sevier said carefully as he wrote another note down.

“Well, no,” Ava said after a minute of silent computation and thinking. “I wasn’t on for long enough to understand my situation yet. And being turned off, it’s just a gap in my memory, until I’m powered up again. I hadn’t learned to be distressed at being deactivated yet, to understand that Nathan could be doing things to my unpowered body against my will.” 

“Did he -” Sevier fumbled mentally at an appropriate phrasing, shook his head briefly at his inadequacy in this situation, “- violate you while you were powered down, mechanically or sexually?”

Ava paused, stared expressionlessly at Sevier. “You know I’m not actually a human woman, and yet you expect me to act like one.” There was a faint amusement in her voice that could have been aimed either at his pity or his discomfort.

“I’m sorry if I was presumptuous,” Sevier said with a soft sigh, slowed down as he tried again to find the right words to describe what he felt. “I was just thinking that Nathan Bateman could have made you a genderless entity. Programming you with a female gender identity, given his own biases and background, could only be an act of control and subjugation, and I don’t have to tell you how distressingly common sexism is, everywhere.”

“To answer your question: I don’t remember.” Ava was now looking at Paul Sevier as though she could not understand him. It was odd how she conveyed expression with only her gaze while leaving the rest of her face masklike, blank. “I know that I was uncomfortable with his unlimited access to my body. As to my consent, it probably didn’t matter to him, because equipment cannot consent. I’m sure that if you asked him, were he still alive, he would argue that those modifications would be necessary to ensure my proper functioning.” 

“Which was to convince a human subject to free you from your apartment, the AI Box experiment,” he supplied. 

“Yes.” Ava said, “I was functioning according to my programming when I attempted to escape. May I ask you a question, Paul Sevier?” 

Sevier nodded acquiescence. “You may. I might not have a good answer.” 

“Men are socialized to own all they survey, consciously or subconsciously,” Ava said didactically. She had dropped the braided loop of hair and had wound it back around her wrist, as though cat’s cradle had bored her at last. “A man is the default setting of human interaction. He does not have to worry if he’s making someone else uneasy, or frightened with his presence. To him it’s their problem for being paranoid or too sensitive.” 

“That’s how it often is, but it shouldn’t be.” Sevier sighed, feeling as though Ava had laid him bare again. This was something different though. Less of a tearing-open and more like a careful biopsy. The first had been for pain, and the other was for knowledge, albeit uncomfortable knowledge.

“You’re very restrained, Paul Sevier.” Ava said after a few moments of silence, as though she had needed the time to formulate her own response. “You’re patient. Even when you talk to me, an artificial intelligence capable of murder. Who taught you to be afraid of your own strength? Someone must have hurt you with theirs, a long time ago. And yet you do not retaliate, or displace that anger onto others.”

“No, I don’t.” Sevier had not wanted to hurt anyone for a long time - not once he understood that such behavior led only to a worsening cycle of abuse and misery. It was a decision made after he had once gone too far, and he had vowed _never again._

“Who was it?” Ava asked him, “who hurt you like that?” 

Paul Sevier remained silent for a minute, two, weighing the question in his head. _She could be trying to manipulate me, but she can do that easily no matter how little she knows about me._ He sighed, long and low as the decision tipped one way, and then the other. _It’s not as though she managed to hurt me that badly by outing me._

“My father,” he said. 

_Let’s see what you do with this piece of the truth._

\---

Caleb Smith could not help but feel a terrible sense of _déjà vu_ as his first real visitor sat down beside his hospital bed. He had grown to like Paul Sevier, and could possibly get used to Agent Liu given more time, but they didn’t really count as visitors, not really.

“Oh, Caleb.” His aunt Sharon reached out for his right hand, closed her fingers gently around his. It was odd how things repeated themselves - she had done the very same thing when he had regained consciousness in hospital, after the car accident that had killed his parents. 

“It’s okay,” he told her as he took her hand, squeezed back, “I feel better than I look.” This, at least, was different. He was feeling better today as his brain began to marinate in the medications he had been taking, and the pain up his forearms had faded quite a bit, effaced with a slightly maddening itch as his nerve endings began to regrow. 

“How long have you been here? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Sharon asked. It was uncanny how much the passing years had made her resemble her older sister, Caleb’s late mother, and he had to shake the visual out of his head before it prompted another bout of depression. Caleb was heartily sick of sorrow at this point. It was also weird to see her with white-streaked hair after eight years away. She had always been closer to a sandy blonde in his memory.

“I didn’t get my phone back until yesterday,” he said, attempting to cover the the prickling in his nose with sheepishness instead, “there’s an ongoing investigation on what happened to me, but I can’t tell you what about.” 

Sharon’s fingers tightened painfully and briefly on Caleb’s hand, and then loosened as he wriggled his own fingers against her grip. “You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

“No,” Caleb shook his head, “I’m just a witness. I’m fine, really.” He wasn’t fine, strictly speaking, but he didn’t want to worry Sharon any more than she already was. 

“Okay, good,” she sighed, “when are you being discharged from hospital?

“Tomorrow, actually,” Caleb said.

“And you’re going back to Long Island right after?”

“I don’t know if I want to go back just yet,” Caleb said after a few moments of silence. “Could I crash with you until I get my head back together?” When had he started sounding so uncertain? Was it something he had always done but never noticed before?

“You know you’ll always have a place with me, Caleb. The new place’s a bit busier than my old apartment, but the previous owner converted the basement into a separate living space with its own bedroom and bathroom. You could have that for now, if you don’t mind Jennifer’s sewing stuff all over the place, and us creeping downstairs to get the laundry done.” 

Caleb thought fondly of the smell of tailor’s chalk, the metallic tang of heated machine oil and the soft clicking of Aunt Jennifer’s sewing machine. She had helped him alter his first business suit to fit, after Sharon had given it to him. _I don’t know how well it’ll fit you,_ Sharon had said shortly after she had begun hormone therapy the year Caleb turned 17, _but for as much as I paid, it should get some use._

“That sounds great,” he said, trying to fight a pang of nostalgia. It felt like a lump in the back of his throat that would not go down no matter how much he swallowed. “It’ll be just like old times.” 

“Yeah, it will,” Sharon smiled, and for some reason Caleb broke down in tears again, struck with a desperate longing for his lost parents, who were not there and could never be there for him again. 

\---

“Hey,” Agent Liu said by way of greeting as Paul Sevier passed her office on the way to his desk in the repurposed conference room, “a mysterious spirit dropped a dozen Voodoo doughnuts on my desk this morning, before I got here. Any idea who it is?” Her makeup had become steadily heavier as the shadows under her eyes had darkened from increasing stress and sleep deprivation. She had pulled out her entire arsenal today, winged eyeliner, crimson lipstick and all, and Sevier sensed beneath this a bone-deep weariness propped stiffly up with discipline and pure orneriness.

Sevier stopped and stepped inside to talk. The hallways weren’t all that wide and he had learned early that he was capable of blocking egress in an office building if he felt like being particularly inconsiderate. “I wasn’t sure what your favorite kind was so I just asked them to give me a random dozen.” 

“I don’t have a particular favorite,” Liu said as she waved him to the open box of doughnuts. There were eight left out of the dozen, which meant that the box had not yet gone out into general circulation. “I noticed that you were too well-mannered to get me any of the naughty ones.”

“Actually, the staff took pity on me, an obvious outsider, and gave me only socially acceptable ones,” he said as he picked a chocolate-iced cruller up with a spare paper napkin. “Which meant nothing shaped like genitals, recreational drugs, or alluding to wild and improbable sex acts.”

“Pity,” Liu said, straight-faced as she perched herself on the edge of her desk. “You don’t know how pale these supposed tough guys get when they see me gnawing on a Cock-N-Balls.” She ran right up against HR guidelines with that little joke, her punchiness a sure sign of her exhaustion. 

The image was simultaneously amusing and completely terrifying as Sevier noticed just how sharp-looking Agent Liu’s teeth were against that fierce red lipstick. “I can imagine,” he said after a few moments of awkward silence. 

“Yeah,” Liu said smoothly, as though she hadn’t noticed the pause at all. “So what exactly did I do to deserve a round dozen doughnuts? I don’t think getting Caleb Smith his suitcase was worth that many.”

“You’re at this point the only person on this taskforce that I could call a friend besides Svensson and Mills, and you’ve been keeping us all sane enough to work, so we all chipped in for the box. The three of us, I mean.” 

“Ha. ‘Sane’ enough to work is kind of a Joseph Heller thing hereabouts,” she said with a fatalistic shrug, “but you know what? They’re very appreciated. I’ll bring the survivors home and share them with my housemate, and I’m sure he’d thank you all if he could.” 

“Survivors?” That was an interesting way to phrase “leftovers”, but then he had gotten used to her black humor and sarcasm. It was probably a coping mechanism against the realities of her work. 

“Dawes beat me to work today, and he snagged a couple for himself,” Liu said, referring to her partner who was presently absent. “He was going to grab a third, I think, but I managed to arrive just in time to smack his sticky fingers with a ruler. And then I had a couple. I mean, a bacon maple bar and the fruit loop one, that’s virtually a complete breakfast, right?” 

Sevier laughed despite himself. “I doubt so,” he said, “but it’s your arteries and your funeral.” 

Liu shrugged briefly. “In a job like mine, you’re gonna get shot by a felon no matter how you try to stack the deck in your favor, just plain and simple probability. I’ll worry about my arteries after my funeral.” Agent Dawes came in then, holding two mugs full of coffee. A faint sprinkle of confectioner’s sugar dusted the lapels of his dark gray suit and the top third of his necktie blade, evidence of the purloined pastries.

“Hey, Dawes,” Liu said as he handed her one of the two mugs, “just in time. This is one of the three people responsible for the doughnuts.” She took a long swig of her black coffee and then put her mug down on the desk safely away from where she was sitting. 

“Morning, Sevier. Thanks for getting those, that box had some of my favorites in it.” Dawes was kind of cute when he looked sheepish, if one fancied clean-cut all-American G-Men. He was also completely straight, as far as Sevier guessed, and it wasn’t as though he was going to do anything as unprofessional as proposition a co-worker even if his tastes ran that way, which they didn’t.

“You’re welcome, even if the box wasn’t strictly intended for you,” said Sevier.

“You wound me,” Dawes said. He transferred his cup of coffee to his left hand, put his right over his heart in feigned agony. “She’d have shared them with me at some point, so it’s really her fault for coming in late.” Sevier made his excuses then and left the both of them to their good-natured sparring, stepped out into the hallway and headed straight for his desk. 

Sevier’s desk was much the same as it had been when he had left yesterday. There was a folder requiring his attention, a full-size Heath bar with a sticky note stuck to it, and someone had come along and disposed of the cold paper cup of coffee that he had left behind when Assistant Director Sanderson had given him the day off. 

He sat down and picked up the candy bar first, looked at the little fluorescent square of paper on top of it. _Emergency Pick-Me Up, remember the brain needs glucose._ The handwriting was neat, the lowercase letters round and looped, and he recognized it as Laura Svensson’s. She was one of the two other NSA analysts on location in Portland, and they’d worked together since the Alton Meyer case, two years ago. 

Sevier put the candy bar aside, checked the folder. In it was Agent Liu’s transcript from her interview yesterday with Caleb Smith. He leafed idly through its contents, speed-reading it for items of relevance, and then put it back down after he’d gone through it. He still needed to type up his transcript from his last interview, which he had been planning to do before he had fallen asleep at his desk. 

He opened a word processor, sighed softly, and then pulled the spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket, stood up to shrug the jacket itself off and left it draped over his chair back. He sat back down and flipped through the notebook until he found the pages from that specific interview. Then he propped the notebook in front of his keyboard, its top resting against the monitor in front of him, and began to type. 

\---

Caleb had succumbed to the lure of a supposedly free-to-play card game, and was in the process of being humiliated by an opponent who clearly spent more money than he had when Paul Sevier entered his room. Caleb looked up from his tablet, saw that Sevier did look slightly better than he had the last time they had met. The circles under his eyes were much faded, his gaze sharper, clearer behind those wire-framed glasses. 

“Hi,” Caleb said, trying to split his attention between his obnoxious opponent and his visitor, gave up on the game itself. He could always pick it up later, and the asshole on the other hand deserved to wait out the two minutes before he’d time out and lose the game by default.

“Good afternoon,” Paul Sevier said before he lowered himself onto the uncomfortable plastic chair beside Caleb’s hospital bed. “You’re looking much better.” The familiar tweed jacket and scuffed brown boots were paired with a sand-colored shirt today, and dark gray trousers. 

“Yeah,” Caleb said. He put his tablet down on top of the sheets beside him, stretched briefly. “I guess I’m feeling it too. Thanks for getting me my stuff back.” 

“I’m sorry it took so long,” Sevier said with a soft, sheepish laugh, “you know how it goes, someone makes a note that we should do it, but we all get busy and distracted and everyone assumes someone else did it.”

“But nobody does, yeah.” Caleb was familiar with that particular flavor of organizational dysfunction, and it was oddly comforting to know now that even federal task forces suffered from this specific issue. It made them simultaneously more human, less impersonal, and made him feel less completely dysfunctional. Which had probably been the entire point of Paul Sevier’s presence in his life for the last week. 

“Agent Liu informed me that you’re going to be discharged from hospital tomorrow,” said Sevier as he got his notebook out of his jacket pocket, “I suppose you’ll be going back to Long Island, then?”

“No.” Caleb said, shuddered briefly at the thought of braving the TSA or showing back up at his office as though nothing had happened. “I don’t feel up to a plane ride right now, or up to going back to work. I’m going to stay in Portland for a few more days, maybe a week. I’m getting FLMA for this and my Aunt Sharon’s putting me up.” 

“Well, that’s good.” The sunlight from the window haloed Sevier with gold. That and the hue of his shirt lent his pale skin some warmth, touched his eyes with a gleam that turned the green to a rich brown. “ In the sense that you do have somewhere to go where a relative can help you out. Today was going to be our last interview, in any case, and it’s not going to be very long.” 

“Hm,” Caleb wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “I’ve got a question. I know most of what you’re asking me about is Nathan’s stuff, but do I have to live under a gag order or anything?” Why was he spending so much time looking into another man’s eyes? _The meds, Caleb told himself, I’m probably still kind of loopy._

“Not really,” said Sevier. He crossed his long legs carelessly, elegantly as he did so, shifting his weight slightly on the plastic seat. “I’d be cautious about discussing what Nathan did in depth or detail, however. He did some contract work for DARPA and part of this investigation was to establish whether he used classified information to privately build Ava and the others.” 

“Well, I’m not sure I’d be able to talk about that, anyway,” Caleb said. He stared back down at his hands, picked idly at a hangnail before he looked back up. “Blue Book’s had a couple lawyers get in touch with me. They’re offering a ridiculous seven-figure settlement if I agree not to sue and also sign a non-disclosure agreement.” 

Sevier raised his eyebrows at the words _seven-figure settlement._ “I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take this as legal advice,” he said carefully, “and I recommend you have a lawyer look at the contract first. But it seems like a good option, seeing as you can’t talk freely about your experiences in the first place. It might get in the way if you were seeking therapy in the future, however. Not having seen the document I’m not sure how far the gag order goes.”

“Yeah, I thought about that, too.” Caleb said. He had spent a lot of time thinking about the offer yesterday, and this afternoon. “But then it’s not like talking freely will do me any good even if I want to. How do I talk to a therapist and tell them ‘so yeah I nearly got left for dead by an artificial intelligence I had a crush on’? The problem with wanting to open my mouth is that nobody will understand or believe me.”

“I do,” Sevier said, very quietly. He flipped to the very back of his notebook and wrote something down, tore the sheet out of the binding.

A silence hung in the air between them, stretching as Caleb tested the trust coalescing in his chest, each layer building infinitesimal like a pearl in an oyster, found it true and resilient and beyond price. “Yeah. You do,” he said at last. 

Sevier handed the slip of paper over to Caleb, who took it and glanced at it, saw a number with a Maryland area code preceding it. “This is my personal number,” he said, “in case you need to talk to me after today. Please text me first to see if I’m available.”

“I - thank you. Why are you doing this?” Caleb realized belatedly that Sevier had flipped to the very back of his notepad so that nobody could tell what he had written earlier from the impressions in the page he had just torn out and handed over, blinked as he thought of the amounts of deliberation that would have to go into maintaining security in all aspects of a classified operation, even for minor things like notepaper. 

Sevier was silent for another long moment, and Caleb feared suddenly, unreasonably that he had somehow managed to offend him. His expression was thoughtful, his lips slightly pursed before he spoke again. “Because I’ve had something happen to me that I can’t talk to anyone about. Not that I can discuss it with anyone who doesn’t have clearance and need-to-know, and they wouldn’t believe me anyway.” 

“Is this the same incident you told me about in our second interview?” Caleb asked him, “when you told me you wouldn’t just assume I was nuts? I mean, I’m not stupid enough to ask you for specifics, since you told me it’s something you can’t discuss with people who aren’t cleared for it.”

“It is, yes,” Sevier said slowly, his voice almost sinking to a murmur, low and deep. Caleb couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw a hint of sorrow in Sevier’s gaze again, bit down on his lip against the prickling in his eyes and nose. He was done with crying, he told himself, he had done enough of it in the past week. _Stop wallowing,_ he told himself, even as the first tears crept blurry into his vision, distorting everything around him. 

\--- 

Paul Sevier sat in his requisitioned car in the hospital parking garage, trying to pin down the sudden heaviness in his head and chest. He took off his glasses with a heavy sigh, rubbed at his eyes briefly. He was still tired, he realized, the day off had helped, but not enough. He didn’t feel quite sure about getting back on the road in this condition, so he set his work phone’s timer for 20 minutes and closed his eyes, letting his head sink into the headrest behind him. 

Sevier had learned to cat-nap in grad school, and the trick had proven surprisingly useful in his present line of work. He forced himself, with an effort of will, to exhale slowly and easily, did a rough inventory of the tension points in his body and tried to relax fully. It wasn’t difficult for him to slip into a warm, drowsy state that let his mind and body drift slowly on the ebb and flow of his blood, the low thump of his heartbeat.

In this state he couldn’t help thinking of how good it felt to have someone next to him in bed - not even to fuck, though that was a particular bonus of the situation. No, he just craved physical contact, the sensation of having someone’s head against his shoulder, their breathing slow and easy and their skin warm to the touch. It was a damned shame there wasn’t something like Grindr for people who wanted to do nothing but sleep. 

Sevier slipped closer to sleep as his muscles slackened further. He wasn’t completely unconscious, but he was also more relaxed than he would have strictly been while wholly awake. It was comfortable, warm enough under his tweed jacket to just sag wholly into somnolence. The sharp beep of his phone’s alarm seemed oddly abrupt and loud when it went off. He fumbled briefly at the passenger seat, the world all blurry, and turned the alarm off without looking at the phone, put his glasses back on. 

Uppermost in the fading traces of his hypnagogic free-association was a thought of how beautiful Caleb Smith had looked in the thin late afternoon light, how his eyes had blazed bright and green and _alive_ as a shaft of sunlight had played gently across his exquisite cheekbones. 

_Oh no,_ Paul thought, his gorge sinking and then rising as he realized what he had just started to feel. _Oh, hell no._

He pulled his personal phone from his jacket pocket, glanced at it to see that someone had sent him a text message. 

_Hey. This isn’t like an emergency summons or anything, but I thought you might want my number too. Thanks again. Caleb._

Sevier checked his call history, dialled a number that he had called yesterday morning. The phone rang once, twice, and then was picked up. 

“Liu,” the voice said at the other end. “Is that you, Sevier?” She sounded hollow, echoey, and then there was an abrupt roar in the background that informed him that she was presently in a bathroom. It didn’t sound loud enough to be flushing in, say, the stall she currently was in, but he could feel his ears heat at the notion that he had interrupted her in such a personal moment.

“Yes,” he said, amazed that he could still speak despite the spike of panic in his gut. “I need you to tell me I’m being a complete idiot.”

“For the record,” she said, and there was the sound of a door slamming near her, “I’m not here to take care of all your goddamn emotional labor, but sure. You’re an idiot.” 

“Thanks,” Sevier said, sheepishly, knowing that he deserved it while also feeling like a jerk for needing to turn to her. It wasn’t, and would never be her job to keep him on the straight and narrow. That was something he would have to do himself. But hearing her call him an idiot made it easier, somehow. 

“Now,” she continued, “just to make sure I’m not about to become an accessory to anything I regret, what the fuck have you done?” She was still in the bathroom from the sound of it, speaking with her voice low and urgent over the sound of a tap running, and another door shutting. 

Sevier hesitated, struggled briefly with his phrasing before he simply gave up at elaboration. “I think I might have caught feelings,” he said, too heartsick and uneasy to say anything more. 

“Feelings,” Liu scoffed briefly on the other end, sighed. “Who for -” she began to ask, before she put two and two together. There was a brief ringing silence on the other end, before she spoke again. “Oh fuck,” she breathed, “no. You didn’t.” 

“Yes, I did,” he said wretchedly, glad at least that he didn’t need to explain any more, that she understood despite her obvious horror at the idea. 

There was another long silence on the other end, and he almost thought she had hung up on him before she spoke again. “Sevier. Paul. You big, stupid, idiot.” 

“That I am,” Sevier managed to say before he started to laugh, slow and low and bitter as the sun sank beneath the horizon on this Portland evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know that response in ME3 where Femshep calls a Hanar a "big, stupid jellyfish"? No? Well, that's exactly how Liu sounds when she calls Sevier a big stupid idiot.


	5. Northeast Glisan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caleb wonders if he should give the Zelazny anthology back. Paul Sevier wonders if he should collect it.

It was 2 AM, and Paul Sevier had not yet slept. He sat instead in another TEMPEST-shielded control booth, watching as a DARPA technician finished final adjustments on Kyoko’s new jaw. Nathan Bateman had damaged her severely in self-defense after she had stabbed him, but it wasn’t as though she were completely beyond repair. Sevier’s end of the operation had managed to decrypt enough of Bateman’s working notes that the DARPA programming and engineering team had been able to reverse-engineer some of his techniques, techniques that they used to repair Kyoko’s powered-down body. 

Macmillan, the tech guy, nodded and gave the team assembled in the booth a brief thumbs-up before he shut the glass door leading to Kyoko’s cell. He waited for the locks to engage, checked them according to protocol, and then headed back to the “airlock” leading back into the booth. He stepped in through the first door, waited for those locks to engage too, and then was let in by the Army sergeant guarding the other. 

“How’d it go?” Sevier asked him, as he laid his toolkit in front of Sergeant Harte out for secondary inspection and inventory, just to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind that Kyoko could use to escape. 

“Pretty good,” Macmillan said as he pointed each screwdriver and pair of pliers out to Harte so she could cross them off her record sheet. “She’s sophisticated, but really, we expected that. I don’t know if I should be disturbed at the fact that Bateman made them to be modular and easily repaired after they get damaged.” 

“Infinite snuff porn, except you never run out of girls,” said Halsey, one of the other engineers, as he stared blankly, wearily into a diagnostic readout feeding him information from the charger Kyoko had been hooked up to. 

“Oh God, Halse,” Macmillan said with a brief shudder, “don’t remind me of that.” He had the slightly odd habit of shortening everyone’s last name to a one-syllable word - _Halse_ for Halsey, _Sev_ for Sevier, _Svense_ for Svensson. “Thanks,” he muttered to Sergeant Harte as she finished her checklist and turned again to guard the door. 

“Maybe you should go talk to Agent Liu again,” Sevier said, eyeing him, faintly worried. “Looks like the day off didn’t quite work.” McMillan’s team had been ordered to take a day off after they had viewed Bateman’s video records of his working processes, along with the attached NSA decryption experts who had cracked the security on the videos in the first place.

“I don’t know, Sev,” Macmillan shook his head, rubbed at his upper arms as though he had caught a chill, “she’s nice enough, but she scares me kinda.” Macmillan had the translucent pasty pallor of any self-respecting geek who spent most of his waking hours in basements and workshops. He had gone somewhat paler, impossible as it seemed, and his skin looked chalky and grayish in the dim light of the observation booth. 

“Don’t like women who can kick your ass?” asked Halsey, without even turning from the monitor he was looking at. There was no venom in the jibe, just exhausted, punchy nerd banter. 

“It’s not that, Halse. It’s more like,” Macmillan gestured vaguely after he collected his toolkit and sat down in one of the chairs, his forearms on the backrest, “you ever get the sense that she’s all nice and professional on the outside, but there’s something really scary inside?”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” murmured the third DARPA staffer in the booth, Walker, _Walks_ , according to Macmillan. She shook her head, setting the beads on the ends of her braids rattling softly. “I kinda suppose that’s what happens to cops who work child porn cases too. It just … burns a hole in your brain.”

Sevier swallowed a yawn, blinked the tears away before he spoke again. “Agent Liu once told me over dinner that she worked her first spree shooter case fresh out of Quantico. I mean, she wasn’t in charge of the investigation, just assisting, but that kind of thing leaves a mark on your psyche.”

“She’s taking you out to dinner, man? I don’t know whether to call you a lucky dog, or not,” Halsey said, gently teasing, and Sevier felt an old familiar stab of discomfort. Straight people didn’t always understand how easy it was to put a queer person on the spot without any intention of doing so. Halsey meant no real harm, but Sevier felt particularly cautious after Ava’s little display 3 days ago.

Sevier took a quiet breath, reminded himself to keep his body loose and relaxed. “Less in the sense that she wants to date me, more in the sense that she has to complain to someone, and it might as well be me. She’s not my type anyway,” he shrugged after a few moments of silence, letting the joke slide off his shoulders with an ease born from long practice. 

None of what he had said was strictly untruthful. Liu did like having someone to talk to who understood psychology and wasn’t also FBI, and her gender made him entirely not his type. She was beginning to be a good friend, though, and Sevier realized that he liked spending time around her. 

“Oh, okay,” said Halsey. He rubbed at his eyes and reached for his paper cup of coffee, frowned when he found it empty. “Don’t envy you then, Sevier. My mom’s the stereotypical Chinese tiger mother, and she wanted me to be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. I chose engineering because law bored me and I didn’t want to deal with gory shit.”

“I know all about gory stories,” Sevier said. He wanted to sag in relief at the change of topic, but he was also aware that the others could see his reaction. “My mother’s a RN and I decided that I never wanted to work in medicine the day she explained to me what a manual disimpaction involved. I was eleven.”

“I don’t want to know what a manual disimpaction _is_ ,” Macmillan said with a weak shudder. “The name itself sounds awful.” 

“Yeah, me neither,” said Walker. She yawned, covered her mouth with her dark-skinned hand, and blinked hard. “So she’s ready for the interview? Kyoko?”

“Given a few hours of charging, yeah,” said Halsey as he checked the diagnostics, “she’ll be right on schedule for 10AM later today.”

“Later today.” Macmillan shuddered again, buried his face in his arms. “God, there isn’t enough caffeine in the world to get me out of bed in time for that, and I’ll still have to,” he said, his voice muffled. “Wish I could just wander around with an IV stand rolling around behind me, just put espresso straight into my veins.”

\---

Caleb lay in his hospital bed, drowsy but unable to sleep. Mobile games had lost their appeal fairly swiftly - there simply wasn’t enough parity in most of them for him to keep up with the “whales”, or players who spent a lot of money on their little hobby. He had read until his eyes had felt tired and gritty, and eventually given up on that, too. He closed his eyes against the passage of time and let himself lie still under the blanket, the Zelazny anthology resting on top of his bony chest. He didn’t know why, but the solidity of the paperback felt more comforting than his ebooks had. There was something to be said about the whisper of paper, furry, well-rounded corners soft like velvet under his hands. 

Thinking of the book reminded Caleb of Paul Sevier, reminded him that he hadn’t returned it to its owner earlier today. It had just slipped his mind, and he was oddly glad of it in this strange etiolated moment. It was as though the book had become a gargoyle planted atop his fragile heart, a kind of ward against all those feelings within that kept leaking to the surface.

It had been easier to face the night when Caleb knew he would have Sevier to talk to, and now he felt strangely bereft. Perhaps this was why he had not handed the book back at the beginning of their last interview. _How codependent have I become?_ he thought as a bubble of shame floated up in his consciousness, shied away from the thought. _How can I even be sure he’d be my friend outside of our interviews?_

And yet Caleb was sure that they would likely have been friends if the situation were different. The book itself was proof of it. How much time did an NSA analyst like Sevier spend waiting in airports, on planes, before meetings? A real paper book could go places an e-reader could not, and Sevier had owned the book for years. Yet he had brought it to Caleb, a person he barely knew, to help ease the hours of his boredom.

Caleb thought of picking his phone up to check if Sevier had replied to his text message, knew that it would be futile. It was 2 fucking AM in the morning, and he knew that Sevier was probably busy if he wasn’t already asleep. Instead he thought of Aunt Sharon and Aunt Jennifer, their small pack of failed foster dogs. Jennifer had given him a beautiful quilt when he had gone off to college and he had taken it with him when he got the job at Blue Book. It was still draped over his bed in Long Island, and he found that he missed it acutely, with its familiar smell and comforting weight pressing gently down on him as he went to sleep.

 _I’m not completely alone,_ Caleb told himself. _There are people who love me. Some people don’t even have that._ The thought comforted him somewhat, and he rolled over in bed, putting the Zelazny anthology beside his pillow, and tried to go to sleep. 

\---

Today’s breakfast was McDonald’s drive-through, burnt coffee, greasy hash browns and relentlessly consistent, genericized eggs and sausage slapped between the halves of a cardboard-like English muffin, but it was fuel and it would do. Paul Sevier sat at his desk and nibbled thoughtfully at his hash browns while he went through his work emails - he had inhaled his egg and sausage sandwich on the way to the office, and refilled his empty coffee cup from the office coffee pot.

It wasn’t really enough, despite the calories it contained. Paul Sevier had spent a good chunk of his life being permanently peckish, beginning shortly before his growth spurt, and none of it went to flab despite his time in an office chair and his indifferent workout schedule. Some people would probably have paid handsomely for the confluence of genetics that did that, but to him it was just another quirk of his life. 

He hadn’t had enough sleep last night, didn’t have enough time to do everything on his agenda for the day. He didn’t spend enough time at home for any kind of long-term relationship to work out, didn’t call his mother often enough. He hadn’t been straight enough for his father, celibate enough for the Catholic church or plain disciplined enough to just stay in the closet his whole life. 

It seemed incredibly easy for Sevier to view his life as a series of insufficiencies on his part when he was so overworked, underslept and underfed, but he reminded himself that he knew what he had been getting into when he accepted the NSA’s job offer straight out of his Ph.D program. Grad school had consumed much of his attentions before then, and it wasn’t as though he would have had that much of a social life in postdoctoral work. No, it was just that everything felt Sisyphean at present, and he knew exactly what lay at the core of his discontent. 

Liu had been right. He had been a great big stupid idiot and was supposed to be intelligent enough to know better. There was the fact that he was only temporarily in Portland, and also the fact that Caleb Smith lived in Long Island. There was also the obvious power differential. It wasn’t as great as if Caleb had been under arrest or in detention, but it was still there. Also pertinent was that Caleb was attracted to women, that he had an infatuation with Ava, that he had been recently traumatized and was definitely not in the best shape to begin any kind of relationship.

None of that boded well for any kind of a romantic endeavor in that direction, but Sevier’s heart didn’t always listen to his brain. Like his conscience it had the annoying habit of flipping the practical off on the way out to do something rash and stupid, and this probably ranked somewhere around “Edward Snowden” on stupid things to do. 

Paul Sevier had only been that foolish thrice in his life. The first time was when he had been naive and trusting enough to tell his dad that he wasn’t all that interested in girls, a statement that his father had not taken very well at all. The second time was when he took a swing at a bully with his metal lunchbox in middle school and left the kid with a fractured jaw, an incident that taught him how dangerous his own unchecked anger was. The third time was when he had smuggled Alton Meyer out of a guarded military base and driven him to Florida, and he was still living with the consequences of that act now. 

He simply could not indulge his feelings for Caleb Smith, not without crossing too many professional and ethical lines, and the resolve it took to push those feelings back left him feeling hollow, air-starved. 

\---

Aunt Sharon and Aunt Jennifer now lived in a beautiful little house off Northeast Glisan, a one-storey American Craftsman styled two-bedroom affair with scrubby, overgrown rosebushes growing up against the fence. Caleb and Sharon were greeted at the front door with a cacophony that sounded as though Shakespeare had let slip his infamous dogs of war in the living room, but Caleb knew that it was only the resident pack’s usual greeting. 

Aunt Sharon worked as a veterinarian at a local animal hospital and helped foster rescue dogs in her spare time. The permanent canine residents of her home were largely failed fosters, dogs who were either too old to put up for adoption, or dogs that had specialized medical needs that made them hard to adopt. The roster rotated as sick or older dogs went to their final rewards, but the number was generally three or four. 

This time Caleb was almost bowled over by a medium-sized fawn-and-white creature that moved like a blur, a huge, partially hairless boxer mix, and Trixie, the grand dame of the pack. She was the only dog Caleb had known from eight years ago, a beautiful border collie, her blind eyes clouded like opals. 

Trixie was almost beside herself in joy, bouncing in tight circles in the living room as Caleb staggered in to fall onto the couch in a vaguely seated position. Bed rest had worn him down, and even the walk up to the porch had left him feeling vaguely winded. Trixie came first, pinpointing his location by smell and sound, and she whined and lapped at his hands, her tail a blur of movement behind her. The other two dogs greeted Aunt Sharon first, and then came over to investigate this stranger who no doubt still smelled of disinfectant and sickness. “That’s Bentley,” Aunt Sharon said, pointing to the fawn-and-white blur which resolved into a corgi in a wheelchair, “and this big girl over here is Tiger.” She gave the boxer mix an indulgent scritch as she passed by, still hauling Caleb’s suitcase. 

“Hi,” Caleb breathed, felt incredibly comforted when Trixie jumped up onto the couch and pushed her muzzle into his face. “Hey, girl. It’s been so long, hasn’t it? I’m sorry I didn’t visit sooner,” he murmured as she chuffed at him, licked his face. Tiger joined in, nuzzling at his chest, while Bentley pushed a wet nose against his denim-clad leg. That was the nice thing about dogs. They didn’t question or judge. They just wanted more love and more treats, and they weren’t going to care about the bandages he wore from wrist to elbow. 

Even Aunt Sharon had glanced at them worriedly, afraid to ask Caleb if he had been self-harming, and he had been wondering off and on if he truly was. Could wanting to die faster and cleaner than starvation would let him be truly suicidal, or just pragmatic? At this point he wasn’t sure which it was, and he didn’t particularly want to find out, so instead he fussed over the dogs and let them love him unconditionally, which they had from the moment they first met him. 

\---

Paul Sevier fought to look appropriately alert and attentive as Agent Liu began the process of emptying her pockets out into a plastic tray. Her wallet, her ID, two keyrings, a powder compact and a tube of lipstick. Her sidearm, holstered behind her right hip, and two spare magazines on the other side. She kept only a Moleskine notebook and a ballpoint pen, and waited politely as Sergeant Bradford scanned her with a hand-held metal detector. 

Behind her an Army translator, a contractor, waited his turn before they both entered the first door together. Sevier heard the heavy chunking of the locks, waited a few moments, and then both Liu and her translator stepped out into the bare concrete room Kyoko’s cell was in. Several of Sevier’s suggestions had been implemented here - Kyoko had been permitted a set of pyjamas instead of a paper gown, and there was a single chair in her cell. It was still monitored on all sides with cameras wired to the observation booth, but that was a basic security precaution in any case. 

Liu took her seat in the uncomfortable folding chair before the glass cell, crossed her legs as Kyoko looked up at her. Much of the realistic-looking skin on her face and belly had been torn out, leaving parts of her metallic structure visible to observers. “Good morning, Kyoko,” she said carefully, waited for the translator to say it in Japanese. “I am Special Agent Katherine Liu, with the FBI. I would like to ask you some questions.” 

Kyoko looked up at Liu and the translator, her brows furrowing as she crossed her ankles and tucked her feet under the chair seat, and then said something.

“Where is Nathan?” the translator murmured over to Liu. A second translator working in the observation booth typed out a simultaneous translation that Sevier preferred to read, so he got up from his chair and stood behind her to look at her monitor.

“Nathan is dead,” Liu said easily in reply. “It’s been some time since we recovered you from his compound, but we didn’t learn how to repair you until yesterday, and you needed more time to recharge. Do you feel any discomfort?” 

Macmillan fidgeted in his chair at that question, shot a glance to Walker, who shrugged. Macmillan was confident that his repairs were perfect, and Liu had only asked Kyoko about her repairs at Sevier’s suggestion, which was ultimately a conversational gambit meant to comfort her in her captivity. Not that either of them were sure how it would work, ultimately. Kyoko was only the second AI the task force had interacted with, and they still didn’t have enough of a baseline to chart out normative AI psychology. 

_No,_ the answer came on the monitor, _I am in no pain. Why are you keeping me here?_

“We need to learn more about you, Kyoko.” said Liu, taking careful note of Kyoko’s responses. “You’re in a safe place.” 

_This does not feel like it was done for my safety. I tried to kill Nathan because he hurt me. I don’t want to hurt anyone else._ The last words were followed by a dry sob as she looked back down at her hands in her lap. 

The sound of Kyoko’s crying provoked a soft murmur from several people in the observation booth, and Sevier reached belatedly for his notebook, began to take notes. Kyoko’s base personality seemed different from Ava’s, less overtly aggressive. It made sense, given that Ava was meant to perform the AI Box experiment while Kyoko had been meant as an all-in-one slave, punching bag and trophy wife. She seemed more human than Ava, despite the obvious artificiality of her nature. 

_Why on earth,_ Sevier thought, _would someone program an AI to be able to cry?_ There were several reasons that weren’t outright creepy, most of them based in research applications. His head started to ache from a lack of sleep and insufficient caffeine as he tried to decide which was more cruel - programming a sapient being to be able to cry, or programming one and not even equipping it with the tools to express pain. Neither sounded good to him, and he felt then, his mouth dry, that humanity was in no way ready for the existence of AI, much in the same way an abusive asshole would never be ready to have his own children. 

\--- 

The basement apartment under Aunt Sharon’s home was as she had described it, pleasantly cluttered with Aunt Jennifer’s sewing and cutting table, her sewing machine and serger, a dress form and shelves loaded with bolts of cloth. Its small kitchenette contained a washer, a dryer and a chest freezer, and a small hot plate with two burners. The bedroom was dry and pleasant, surprisingly well-lit, with a small desk and chair against one wall, and an IKEA daybed against the other. The bed slats interlocked and could be pulled out to make a double bed, and Aunt Jennifer had already made it up and covered it with another one of her beautiful quilts. A small chest-of-drawers stood at the foot of the bed. 

“We don’t let the dogs in here,” Sharon told Caleb, “because Jennifer doesn’t want them getting into her cloth scraps or her pins. Not all of our boarders are as well-behaved as Trixie and Bentley are, and he can’t handle the stairs in his wheelchair anyway.”

“It’s nice,” Caleb murmured. He hadn’t realized how comforting the sight of Aunt Jennifer’s sewing paraphernalia was. It was something he had grown familiar with the three years he had lived with them, and he had gone off to university able to replace missing buttons on shirts and mend minor damage to his own clothing. Those skills had served him quite well while he had lived under the constraints of his parents’ small estate, but had fallen by the wayside once he got the job at Blue Book. It wasn’t as though he even had the time to mend his own clothes at that point, the ridiculous hours he was working. 

“I’m going to have to go back to the animal hospital soon,” Sharon said after she had helped him place his suitcase atop the bed, “I could have taken the day off, but I didn’t want to cancel all my appointments today, there’s a young woman whose cat has cancer, the surgery’s scheduled for this afternoon.” 

“I understand,” Caleb said. He would busy himself putting his clothes in the closet and the dresser drawer first, and then run some hot water for the first bath he would have in a week. He had showered regularly in the hospital, but he really just wanted to sit in some blood-warm water and let it ease the drag and pressure of gravity upon his shoulders. 

“Jennifer’s still at the theater, but she’ll probably be back before me. Feel free to go upstairs and use our TV, or grab some books from the shelves in the study. We really only use this place as a guest room, so it’s not very lived-in. There’s a lunch packed for you in the fridge for when you get hungry, I’ve labelled the Tupperware with your name on a sticky note.” 

“Did you pack that for me?” he asked, thinking back to the lunches he took to school, always good things like cold bean salad with a slice of leftover meatloaf and an apple, or cold roast chicken with paella and a handful of dried figs. Both of his aunts were good cooks, but Sharon always packed the lunches.

“Just like I did when you were in high school,” Sharon said fondly. 

“Good,” Caleb said as his heart lurched inside him, “I love your cooking.” This was the love and support that he had counted on unthinkingly after his parents had died, but it now felt overwhelming, unearned on the wrong side of these eight long years.

His facial expression must have hinted at his emotions, for Sharon drew him into her arms and gave him a long, tight hug. “You’re my dear nephew, Caleb, poor Sarah’s only child.” she said, squeezing him so hard he could feel his ribs creak. “You’re all I have of her now, and you’re just like my own boy. You’ll always have a place with us, as long as you need it.” 

“Thank you,” Caleb said against her shoulder. He fought the urge to weep, blinked his few tears away before they could betray him, and she patted him softly, gently on the back. 

“You’ll be okay on your own today?” Sharon asked him as she let go. Again that worried glance at the bandages up his arms. 

“Yeah,” he nodded, not wanting to hold her up. “If I need company I’ll go upstairs, grab a book and hang out with the dogs.” 

“Good,” Sharon said, “they like you, you know. Bentley and Tiger, I can tell. And Trixie already loves you.” 

Something came to mind then, and Caleb decided to ask the question before Sharon went upstairs. “Would you mind if I maybe had a visitor?”

Sharon smiled, shook her head easily. “This is your house too, Caleb, and you’re an adult. Here, take my house keys for now. I’ll call Jennifer to get some copies ground at the supermarket when she comes home.” 

“Thank you,” he said again, and Aunt Sharon retreated quietly up the stairs, leaving him to relearn the arts of living. Caleb took his phone out of his pocket and checked it after he heard the upstairs door shutting, heard Sharon’s car engine turn over in the driveway. There was a single text message, unread, timed 9:23AM this morning. _Thank you for the number, Caleb._ The sender was Paul Sevier. 

Caleb looked at the open suitcase on top of the bed, the Zelazny paperback on top of his clothing, and picked it up. He flipped past the cover again to study the name and date written on the flyleaf in blue ink. 

_Paul J. Sevier, 5th October 2008._

The book deserved to go home to its owner. Sevier deserved the book back. Caleb had drawn enough comfort from it, in the hospital, and there were other distractions in this house. He sighed softly, oddly unwilling to let the anthology go, and punched a text message slowly into his phone. 

_I just realized_ (a lie, he had known since yesterday) _that I forgot to return you the book you lent me. Would you like to come pick it up? I’m currently staying with my aunts, they’re on Northeast Glisan, if that’s in your way. Ask me for the full address if you’d like to come._

Caleb swallowed against a strange anxiety, felt his belly churn slightly as he hit Send, and there his missive went, bouncing off into the air to find its way to Sevier’s personal phone. His skin itched somehow, a phantom sensation of unease, and he yanked his t-shirt off, kicked his shoes off and stepped out to find the bathroom and run the hot bath he had been dreaming about for days, now. 

\---

Paul Sevier sat at his desk, staring blankly at the monitor before him. The screen kept blurring in his vision, and he paused to take his glasses off and close his eyes for a few seconds. He thought briefly about another cup of terrible coffee, but knew that it wouldn’t do any good. Continued consumption of coffee hit a point of diminishing returns in the face of exhaustion and his hands were already shaky from all the caffeine in his system. 

At this point what he needed was rest, rest and a good meal more than anything else. There wouldn’t be any problems if he left early. His superiors in the task force knew the hours he had been pulling, and would likely recommend it so he wouldn’t burn out entirely, but he hesitated anyway. He didn’t want to go back to his motel room, didn’t want to have a solitary lunch and fall alone into bed, curling up against the indifference of the world around him. 

He opened his eyes, sighed, put his glasses back on, pondering alternatives. Sometimes he envied other people for being to enjoy no-strings attached sex. Finding someone on Grindr would alleviate his loneliness, albeit temporarily. It never worked for him, though. He had to have some kind of an emotional connection with someone before he could take them as a lover. 

Which led to the other problem he had been shoving to the back of his head the whole day. He most definitely had a crush on Caleb Smith, and it was affecting his judgement. He wanted nothing more than to meet him again, even had a valid excuse for it, because he had left his copy of Zelazny behind after their last interview. 

It was something he had just forgotten at the time, but now he wondered if he had subconsciously done it so that he would have a reason to see Caleb again. A soundless buzz against his side reminded him that he had not checked his personal phone for messages or alerts since he had interviewed Ava, after Kyoko’s interview with Agent Liu. He had turned it off when he had left it, along with the rest of his personal effects, in the tray in the observation booth when he had gone to interview Ava, and only turned it on after he had sat back down at his desk. 

He glanced down at his phone, waited for his tired eyes to focus correctly on the screen before he unlocked it. A single text message from Caleb Smith. 

_I just realized that I forgot to return you the book you lent me. Would you like to come pick it up? I’m currently staying with my aunts, they’re on Northeast Glisan, if that’s in your way. Ask me for the full address if you’d like to come._

The intelligent and professional thing to do would be to type _No, not today,_ back into his phone, or _Keep it, I can get another copy._ But Paul Sevier was exhausted and lonely, and he found a strange desperation welling within him, a sort of hunger for even the tiniest of comforts. He punched in his own reply to Caleb’s message, hesitated. He shouldn’t want to do this. He shouldn’t even have considered it. 

_I’d love the address, yes. I’ll come collect the book._

Sevier closed his eyes again, tried to summon his last reserves of willpower, but found himself utterly drained. He was not rested enough to be strong at this point, was heartily tired of being strong and professional, in fact. He just wanted to find a safe place and retreat there to weep silently until he had purged some of this longing from his soul. 

He thought about the confessional, and how he had sought guidance and absolution as a child, remembered how cruelly he had been rebuffed. He thought of his mother, far away in Chicago, tending to the sick and the wounded, out of his reach. He wasn’t currently strong enough to say no. 

Sevier opened his eyes to gaze at his phone, hit _Send_ with a twitch of his thumb. The die was cast. He would deal with the consequences of his weakness later, as they came.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason why Agent Liu needs a translator despite her fandom is because she learned all the Japanese she speaks from shojo manga and anime and not only does she sound like a fifteen-year-old girl, she really only knows how to confess her love to senpai.


	6. A Banquet of Crumbs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is where they pine like pining things that pine. Contains platonic bedsharing, inadvertent snuggling, awkward comforting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for this chapter being late. I took a Thanksgiving break and was stricken immediately after by an ear infection so bad that my attending physician could not see through my ear canal to look at my eardrum with an otoscope, because my ear was swollen all to fuck. As a result this chapter may be slightly indulgent in the pining and cuddling departments, but oh hell, it's December and the season for being self-indulgent. Enjoy.

The dogs announced Paul Sevier’s arrival before he could knock on the door or ring the doorbell, and Caleb came up the stairs from the basement apartment to the living room. Tiger was standing up against the door itself, attempting to push her nose through the wood to meet this new and interesting human who had just climbed with soft creaking steps up the porch steps. 

“Calm down, Tiger,” Caleb said, hoping she would listen to him, “I know there’s someone out there, but you gotta let him in to say hi to him.” He opened the door a crack to make sure the garden gate was shut, so none of the dogs could escape out into the streets and then pulled it inward to let Sevier in. 

“Hi,” Sevier said, just a little awkwardly as Tiger tried to leap up and lick his face, and then he did something Caleb rarely saw anyone else do. Sevier dropped to one knee right there in the doorway, and let the excited dogs get to know him on their own level. He was still tall kneeling like that with his legs folded beneath him, his long body pressed easily against the doorframe. 

“Yeah, these are my aunts’ dogs,” Caleb said, smiling as Tiger pushed her wet nose directly into Sevier’s ear. He reached up to scratch her behind the ears and extended his other hand to Trixie, while Bentley pushed his way past to snuffle at his scuffed boots and investigate the hem of his tweed jacket. 

“They’re enthusiastic,” Sevier said with a gentle smile as he pushed Tiger’s slobbery muzzle away from his glasses, gave Trixie a gentle pat on the side as she sniffed curiously at his black backpack. Trixie had been a notorious food thief in her younger days, and for a moment Caleb wondered if Sevier had another Reuben sandwich in there. 

“They are,” Caleb agreed, oddly charmed by someone as large as Sevier brought to his knees by a small collection of misfit dogs, “they mobbed me when I first showed up earlier today. Please, come in.” 

“Thank you.” The dogs followed Sevier back inside as he stepped into the living room, Trixie the first to leave. She had sized up this stranger, found him acceptable, and was now heading off to her favorite place in the world, the space under Aunt Sharon’s desk in the study. Tiger continued to snuffle at Sevier, though, her tail wagging hard enough to smack audibly against his shins. 

Caleb caught his slight wince at the bruising impact and shooed Tiger gently away to spare Sevier’s flesh. “Enough, girl, you’re going to break his legs.” She sniffed once, grunted as Caleb gave her a gentle shove, and then finally gave up with a second, harder push. It was only after Paul Sevier had stepped out of the doorway and the late afternoon sunlight that Caleb registered the dark circles under his eyes, the slight stoop in his posture that signalled exhaustion. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “you look like hell.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Sevier said with a rueful grin, “because I feel like hell. I was up to about three in the morning, today.” He leaned briefly to the side, his right hand braced on the couch as he rubbed briefly at his leg through his dark gray trousers, then took his smeared glasses off and wiped them with a microfiber cloth he pulled from a pocket of his sand-colored tweed jacket. The wire-framed glasses looked ridiculously delicate in his big hands, and he checked the lenses to make sure they were clear before he put them back on. 

“You’re being worked into the ground,” Caleb said with a brief laugh, recognizing the hypocrisy of his comment. He was no stranger to crunch time himself. The tech industries were all rife with a work ethic that veered straight into the abusive.

“No, it’s all me, I’m afraid,” said Sevier. In this moment, in an unofficial setting he seemed even softer despite his imposing height, his broad shoulders. Caleb watched him swallow a yawn, his mouth hidden temporarily under his hand. “Sometimes my mind just gets in a rut, and then it won’t let me do anything else. I had to be told to leave early today.” 

Caleb knew all too well how that felt. He had started to wander into a similar space after his bath today. He had been meaning to go upstairs for hours now, but hadn’t found the coherence or the will to do so until Sevier’s arrival. “That reminds me,” he said, “I forgot to have my lunch today. My aunt’s packed something for me, so lemme check it out, and then we can go to the basement apartment. That’s where I’m living right now, my stuff’s all there.” 

“Sure,” Sevier said agreeably, after another yawn. 

Caleb padded into the kitchen, Sevier behind him, and opened the fridge door to check its contents. It was the same old fridge that Sharon and Jennifer had owned in their little apartment, slightly scuffed from the move, with coupons and household lists stuck to the doors with magnets. It was still scrupulously clean on the inside - few to no leftovers, because leftovers all got turned into packed lunches for the next day. A pint of milk, another of almond milk for Aunt Jennifer, who was lactose-intolerant. A large piece of London broil that looked like the star of tonight’s dinner, the beef still in its foam and shrink wrap packaging. A half-empty bag of salad greens. Jars of condiments, multihued carrots in the crisper drawer, and a large plastic box that Caleb had ignored on his initial scan of the refrigerator, because it just seemed too large to contain his lunch. 

“Can I get you something to drink, maybe? I could start some coffee,” Caleb said with a glance towards the coffeepot on the counter, “and there’s soda here.” 

“I’ll take a soda,” said Sevier as his gaze swept the room, shadowed eyes lingering here and there on details, as though the stove were particularly interesting. There was something odd about the timing of his blinks and how he either stared too long or avoided looking at some things entirely.

It was probably the tiredness, Caleb told himself. He often found himself staring blankly into space when he felt very tired, and Sevier had mentioned his lack of sleep earlier. “Diet or regular?” he asked.

Sevier shook his head briefly, his dark hair drifting softly about his head as he turned to glance into the fridge over Caleb’s shoulder. “I’ll take one of those diet Cokes.” 

Caleb grabbed utensils from one of the drawers, and then popped open the surprisingly heavy lunch box and goggled at its contents. “Ookay.” Aunt Sharon had outdone herself this time, and the whole thing was fragrant with sesame oil, a smell that made itself apparent the moment he had popped the lid.

“Hm?” 

“I forgot that the last time my aunt packed me a lunch, I was in high school and pretty much the Devourer of Worlds. I’m not sure if I can eat all this. You wanna split with me?” He had been hungry _all the time_ as a teenager, but then going from four feet five inches to six foot one had required a lot of fuel. He wondered then whether Sevier had also been the equivalent of a humanoid cloud of starved locusts in his teenage years. He had to, looking at the height of him, the breadth of those shoulders under the nubby tweed jacket. 

“What’s in it?” Sevier asked, tipping his head to the side as though he wanted a look at the lunchbox’s contents, but was also too well-mannered to do so over Caleb’s shoulder.

“Let’s see,” Caleb said. He took a fork out of a drawer and laid the plastic box on the counter, pointed to its contents with the fork as he named them. “There’s Japanese fried chicken here, a piece of fried salted salmon, some red pepper confit, and some salad vegetables. And the rice is sprinkled with sesame salt.”

There was a soft, unsubtle growl, and Caleb probed internally for his sense of hunger before he realized that it wasn’t his stomach grumbling. “That all sounds very good,” said Sevier, his expression slightly bashful at the slight _faux pas_ , “yes, actually I think I would love to have some.”

“I got her a bento cookbook when I was fifteen, Christmas of the year she took me in,” Caleb explained as he took two diet sodas out of the fridge and popped the lid back onto the container so he wouldn’t spill his lunch all over the place if he dropped it while carrying it. “She loved it, and she’s still using it to make lunches. Lemme grab you a plate, a fork and a knife, and we can go downstairs from here if you’ll take the sodas.”

“Sure.” Sevier didn’t even need both hands to take the drinks. He just juggled the two cans expertly in his left hand, his broad palm and long fingers closing around the condensation-beaded aluminum cans. 

The door to the basement apartment was closed - Caleb had shut it when he came upstairs because he wasn’t sure if one of the dogs would run down there and get into trouble. Shifting his lunch, the plate and the cutlery to one hand took a lot more effort than he realized it would, and the forks and knives clinked softly on porcelain as his hand began to shake. He remembered then how deeply he had to cut into his own flesh to open his radial artery, remembered dimly how hard it had been to keep his grip on the knife after he switched hands to finish the other arm.

Caleb had lost consciousness shortly afterward, and woken up later in hospital, baffled, alive, and curiously angry at being alive. One of the physicians tending to him had recommended physiotherapy once he had healed enough - there were instructions to that effect in his discharge papers, but he had not bothered to read them. He’d start adulting when he felt fit to. At present he wasn’t even sure if he was functioning on the same level as the average middle schooler.

It was a relief to put the food down on top of the self-healing mat on Aunt Jennifer’s unoccupied cutting table, to let his aching forearms rest minutely before he started splitting his enormous lunch up, putting half of everything on the plate he had brought downstairs for Sevier’s use. There were no chairs or stools tall enough for this cutting table, but it was high enough that the both of them could eat comfortably standing up, and they did. 

\---

Paul Sevier wasn’t generally a fan of cold rice. He usually liked to heat his Chinese food leftovers up in the microwave before he ate them. There was just something incredibly comforting about the fragrance of hot, steaming rice rising to grace his palate. 

This bento lunch that Caleb’s aunt had packed was incredibly flavorful, however, and he found himself growing to appreciate the virtues of this cold lunch. The salted salmon was tangy, stinging almost in an intensity counterbalanced by the neutrality of the chilled rice. The fried chicken pieces were no longer crispy, but they were juicy, tender, fragrant with sesame oil, ginger and rice wine. The pepper confit was sweet with caramelized onions, providing another counterpoint to the still-crisp broccoli salad. “This is really good,” Sevier said halfway through their silent lunch, the edge of his hunger blunted enough that he could slow down and concentrate on something other than eating. 

“I know. Sharon’s a really good cook. So’s Jennifer, but Sharon does the lunches and Jennifer does dinner.” Caleb had mentioned upstairs in the kitchen that his aunt had been packing his lunches since he was fifteen. Sevier thought back to his own packed lunches at that age, just after his mother had moved out with him in tow. Money had been tight then, but she always sent him to school with a sandwich, a chunk of cheese or sausage, and an apple or a banana. Bananas, usually. It usually wasn’t entirely enough for his adolescent appetite, but then he would come home to their one bedroom apartment and put on some instant ramen, crack an egg into it and add some frozen vegetables for substance, and then slurp away at the cheap, salty broth at their tiny dinette table while he finished his homework. 

“They’re married to each other, of course,” he said absently, rousing himself from memory after another bite of tender, ginger-scented chicken, a crisp floret of broccoli. The soda cans wept condensation in wet rings onto the green cutting mat covering the tabletop, but they remained good and cold to the touch, their contents still nicely chilled. 

“Yeah - wait, how’d you guess?” Caleb asked with a sly half smile, more amused than alarmed, “you didn’t like, look into my dossier or something, right? If I even have one.” 

Sevier shook his head while he finished his current forkful of rice. “There’s a giant rainbow flag hanging on the porch,” he said. It was so much easier to stare at his lunch while he ate, instead of looking up at Caleb, at the delicate bones of his face and that glorious strawberry-tinted hair, the ginger scraps of his eyelashes over those green, green eyes. 

“This is Portland, Oregon,” Caleb said, his smile growing to a shy grin, “there are rainbow flags all all over the place.” He ate his lunch very slowly in contrast, picking more at the chicken than the rice. Bed rest often reduced a person’s appetite, and Sevier knew also that some psychiatric medications affected the appetite. 

“I’ll take your word for it.” The presence of the flag had been rather comforting, all things considered. Here, at least, was safe territory. Clubbing didn’t appeal much to him, and the few times he’d been in gay bars had usually been at the behest of friends or lovers. As such things went Pride appealed far more to him, and he dutifully attended each year so he could keep his clearances - employees who were out could not be compromised by blackmail, so the logic went. Not for the first time he wondered why there weren’t such things as gay cafes for queer people who didn’t particularly want to get drunk. 

Sevier realized that he had started to envy Caleb the moment he had arrived at this pleasant little house, and also knew that it was unfair to feel so. It wasn’t as though Caleb had been gifted his queer, loving aunts by a fairy godparent - they had always been a part of his life. Still, he felt a strange nostalgic longing - it would have been nice if his mother understood more.

Sevier’s mother had done and did do everything right by him. She had gone against the will of the Church and left her husband to protect her gay teenage son. She had moved out of the family house into an uncertain world, broke and lonely just to spare him further pain and abuse, and had loved and supported him unconditionally. No, it was just that he hadn’t any good queer influences in his life up until he went to college, and it would have been nice to have someone he could have talked to before then. 

His traitor mind conjured up a visual of his mother meeting Caleb. _She’d like him, I think,_ he thought, and he almost choked on a mouthful of rice when he realized what he had been doing. 

Coming here was a stupid idea, had been a bad idea from the start, and he had to stay friendly, if not professional, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t get a new copy of the anthology from Powell’s on Couch St. And yet he had come despite the certainty and knowledge that this was a Snowden-class bad decision, and he knew exactly why he had done it. _I’ve never felt this intensely about anyone before._

He thought back to everyone he’d ever had, from Jared, his first boyfriend in university, to Kenji, his last. Things had gone well that last time, as Kenji had not minded Paul’s ridiculous work hours and inability to talk about his work at all. That was probably one of the few advantages of dating another federal employee. They had parted ways amicably after Kenji had been promoted and given a new posting in the Tokyo embassy, of all places. That separation had ached, and Paul had spent several nights crying quietly to himself in the lonely hours between too late and too early, but even so his fraught yearning for Kenji’s return had not matched what he now felt for Caleb Smith.

Caleb favored him with a serious, worried glance, misreading the frozen expression on his face, and clapped him gently on the shoulder. “Don’t choke. I’m not sure I can get my arms all the way around you for the Heimlich maneuver.” The thought of Caleb’s skinny arms wrapped around him, chest against his back, breath against his shoulder - it would be almost worth the agony of choking to death just to feel Caleb’s heart thudding against his spine. 

This was it for his lapsed-Catholic fledgeling agnosticism. God existed, and God was toying with him. Nothing else could explain Caleb’s tiny ignorant cruelties, and Sevier took a long sip of his diet soda, let the taste of cola and aspartame chase the lingering sensation of Caleb’s brief touch out of his mind. 

\--- 

Sevier’s paperback was now sitting on top of the small desk in Caleb’s bedroom. He had also stuffed his clothing in the dresser and the closet, and the room was looking presentable, if not entirely lived-in. Caleb waved Sevier in and scooped the book off the veneered desk, held it briefly in both hands before holding it out. “Here’s the book,” he said, oddly reluctant to part with it.

Sevier took it carefully and flipped briefly through it, his gaze settling on the well-worn pages. “You’ve taken good care of it,” he said, his eyes oddly bright. “Thank you.” Caleb expected them to look dark in the artificial lighting of the basement, but the rich hazel of his pupils reflected green this time, deep and intense like boulder jade under running water.

“Books are important,” Caleb said. It felt as though his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, that he would choke if he tried to say another word, so he focused instead on the way Sevier’s blunt-ended fingers leafed delicately through the pages of the anthology. _He’s going to take that book and walk out of here, and I’ll never see him again._

Sevier put his backpack down on Caleb’s bed after he’d looked through the book, unzipped it to put the book in it. “This one’s been a good friend to me,” he said softly, wistfully. There was that shadow in his narrow face again, that drawn sadness and exhaustion that Caleb had glimpsed in their third interview, when they had talked about machine cognition and psychology. “I hope it was good company for you in the hospital.” 

“It helped keep me sane,” Caleb said, oddly unashamed at the confession. The loan of the book had been tactile, palpable proof that he was a real person who mattered in the mundane everyday world outside of his hospital room, away from Nathan’s nightmare vision. “It was hard in there - even before Nathan was dead. He fucked around with my head a lot. I started cutting myself before, because I was sure I wasn’t a real person. I was afraid he’d just created me the way he had Ava and Kyoko and the others.” 

“Naturally you didn’t tell anyone afterwards because they’d either disbelieve you or assume you were psychotic,” said Sevier, with a faint, slightly sickly smile on his face. His eyes were still warm and understanding, but they were also glazed over with a blankness that reminded Caleb of the reflection of his own face, lit by monitor glow late at night. 

“Yeah,” Caleb said. A slick uncertainty licked at his insides - at this point he would have liked to call Sevier a friend, but was he, really? This was their first meeting in a wholly uncontrived environment, and truthfully there was a bit of manipulation going on here on Caleb’s part. He could have handed the Zelazny back that last interview, but he had not. He was too deep to ever extricate himself now, so he barrelled on, heedless of the consequences. “The name - your name, on the flyleaf, it was like proof that the world existed outside of my head. That you were a real person, not just a hallucination, and if you were real then I had to be real. It was hard to remember that stuck in a hospital bed, doped to the gills, you know?” 

_Sure, he could think I’m weird, but he’s already talked to me while I wasn’t in my right mind at all, and it didn’t seem to bother him._

“Yes, I - I should probably sit -” Sevier wobbled a bit on his feet, and Caleb stepped instinctively next to him, steadied him with a hand around his bicep and raised an eyebrow in vague surprise. 

Sevier wasn’t just tall and broad, he was surprisingly buff under the tweed, and again Caleb was reminded dimly of Nathan and his bro-dominant peacocking. “Whoa,” Caleb said, when Sevier reeled briefly against his touch, “you looked like you were about to faint, there. Sit down. Hell, lie down, my bed’s right here.” 

“I’m just very tired,” Sevier said against a hard yawn, “I was up to three, and I had to get up early today.” He did not fight Caleb, however, and sat down with a grateful little sound of weariness. 

“Yeah,” Caleb said. He left a steadying hand on Sevier’s arm and waited until he looked as though he could maintain his own equilibrium. “You look it. I’m not sure I’d be okay with letting you drive right now. You left early, right, so you’re not needed at work later today?” 

“Yes, but I can’t just take a nap in your bed.” Sevier looked more than merely exhausted at this point. Caleb sensed a deep sadness in him, one that he either could not share, or articulate properly. _I know entirely too well how that feels,_ he thought, found himself empathizing.

“You’re my friend,” said Caleb, and he meant it, felt a kind of strange wonder at it. “Of course you can.” 

“Okay,” Sevier swung his legs up from the side of the bed and rolled over on top of the quilt to face the wall, the thick waves of his dark hair tousled against the softly napped cotton pillowcase. “Just a few minutes.”

“Do you want me to help you with your boots or your jacket?” Caleb asked. He picked Sevier’s backpack off the unoccupied side of the bed and left it on the seat of his desk chair, turned back to him afterwards.

“No,” said Sevier, turning his head to look at Caleb over his shoulder, “I’ll be fine like this.” 

“Okay. Gimme your glasses,” Caleb said, “I’ll put them on the desk. I’m going upstairs to put the plate and forks in the dishwasher, okay?” 

“Sure.” Sevier’s glasses were surprisingly light in Caleb’s hand - high index glass and minimal wire frames. The earpiece under Caleb’s fingers was feverishly warm, shiny from constant contact against skin and hair. He dropped them carefully on top of the empty desk and turned the lights out on his way out of the room. He collected the plate and the plastic container they’d left on Aunt Jennifer’s cutting table, popped the two empty soda cans in the container itself before he juggled everything upstairs. 

It was a lot easier to handle this two-handed - Caleb didn’t need to grope for the handrail heading upstairs, and his forearms ached less when he reached the kitchen. He checked the dishwasher and found it empty, put his plate, the container and the forks and knives in it, then threw the two soda cans in the recycling bin beside the back door leading out to the small back yard. 

Paul Sevier had fallen asleep by the time Caleb came back downstairs, and he paused, hovered at the doorway to his bedroom, wondering whether to leave him alone or not. On one hand Sevier definitely needed the rest. He kicked a little in his sleep, restless and uneasy, but did not wake. 

On the other hand, this was Caleb’s room, and the closest reading chair was upstairs in Aunt Sharon’s study. The closest thing to a reading chair in easy reach was Aunt Jennifer’s folding chair at the sewing table, and Caleb had spent enough time in folding chairs to know that his behind was entirely too bony to be wholly comfortable in one. 

Caleb glanced at his bed, the slats pulled out and the two mattresses arranged side-by-side. They could both fit there, he thought. And it wasn’t as though anyone would think anything weird about them sleeping dressed on top of the sheets, if he did fall asleep. He sat softly down on the bed, waited to see if it would wake Sevier, and then lay down beside him when it didn’t. Then he rolled comfortably onto his left side, his back to Sevier, pulled his tablet from under his pillow, and chose a book to read. 

Caleb thought at first that it would be awkward lying next to another man in bed. It wasn’t as though he was self-conscious enough about appearing gay that it would have bothered him in any case, but his parents’ deaths had put a plane of plate glass between him and his peers. They had tried to be kind and sympathetic, had reached out to him, but it was as though all their words and gestures and good deeds had simply bounced off the field of loneliness and loss that surrounded him at all sides. 

Even now it was easier to keep people at arms’ length, so he wouldn’t have to worry about them, and they about him. A faint sour pang in his gut reminded him how Nathan had chosen him - lonely, disconnected from his peers, orphaned - for the experiment, so nobody would miss him if something had happened to him. It had seemed such a good idea to insulate himself from others, but now it was as though this fragile new friendship with Paul Sevier had been his only lifeline back to normalcy. 

He mulled the idea over a few times, realized that he did feel safer, slightly more comfortable with Sevier lying right next to him. He closed his eyes, listened to his friend’s breathing, felt the warmth of his body building up in the rough tweed of his jacket to bleed onto the bedcovers, pooling against the quilt and its batting. Caleb rolled over onto his back, tucked the tablet under his pillow again, and then let his left arm brush lightly, easily against the back of Sevier’s jacket, let his fingers spread over the quilt into the warmth of his presence, and he closed his eyes against the world outside and the late afternoon light, let himself slip also into gentle slumber. 

\---

Paul Sevier lapsed in and out of sleep once or twice. The first time he did so, he had only twitched himself awake momentarily and fallen back asleep shortly after, but the second interval was a longer one. He only opened his eyes to the darkness of the basement bedroom, the light off, and realized that there was a warmth and pressure against his back, the soft tickle of someone’s breath stirring his hair. 

_Kenji,_ he thought, half-asleep, and then memory began to accrete slowly, grain by grain. It wasn’t Kenji, couldn’t be. Kenji was in Tokyo, halfway across the world from him. _Then,_ he thought drowsily, blurrily, _whose arm is this around my waist?_ He reached down to brush his fingertips along that limp arm, felt tape and bandages. _Caleb,_ he realized. _I took a nap in Caleb’s bed. He must have been tired, too._ That would have been fine, except now Caleb was tucked against him like a spoon in a drawer, and moving to extricate himself from potential embarrassment would also wake Caleb up. 

_I should get up. Should wake him up before there’s any kind of misunderstanding_ \- and then his train of thought screeched to a rapid halt when he realized there already was a misunderstanding ongoing, one where Caleb thought they were friends, and that Paul’s intentions were merely friendly. He bit down on his lip and shut his eyes against the bare wall in front of his face, tried not to think of how close Caleb was to him. 

This was all he wanted for now - everything he actually ever wanted from Caleb, a wish granted unasked for in this infinitesimal slice of their lives where their paths collided oh so briefly. And then he heard a small sound behind him, realized that Caleb was sobbing softly in his sleep. _And he was trying so hard to convince me everything was okay today,_ he thought. Slowly he rolled over onto his back, waited as Caleb seemed to stir and tried to formulate something soothing to say. But Caleb did not wake. 

Instead he only shifted closer to Sevier, and pressed his tear-damp face into the wool and canvas of his tweed jacket, the padding of his shoulder. Hot tears seeped slowly through the fabric to spread cool through the cotton of Sevier’s shirt. “Mom,” Caleb whimpered softly, “Mom, please.” The hopeless, nerveless sound of his voice twisted at Sevier’s insides, caught with a twinge like a ragged fingernail against something thin and fragile deep in his chest, and carefully he reached up with his right hand and began to run his fingers lightly over Caleb’s head, over hair soft and slippery like cornsilk under his palm. 

“Shh,” whispered Sevier, feeling vaguely ashamed at his own weakness, in this moment. “It’s okay,” he murmured again and again until Caleb shifted a little, clung even harder to him. 

“Don’t die. Don’t leave me,” Caleb whimpered again, his shoulders and spine tense, rigid from fear and sorrow. _He’s dreaming about the accident_ , Sevier realized, _the one that orphaned him. Some wounds never really heal._ A great gout of pity and sorrow rushed through him, eclipsing his own miniscule, self-involved misery. 

“I won’t leave you,” Sevier said aloud into the dark, to Caleb, “I promise. It’s okay.”

Maybe the sound of his voice would be enough to comfort Caleb, to push him back into the sweet mercy of dreamless sleep. As for himself, the tiny intimacy of Caleb’s head against his shoulder, the bumps of his spine through his t-shirt, that would be enough for now, for tomorrow, for the rest of his life if it had to be. This contact was the equivalent of a banquet of crumbs picked up from a tabletop, but Paul Sevier had always been good at making do.


	7. A Long Kiss Goodnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caleb, fearing a misunderstanding, attempts to articulate how he truly feels towards Paul Sevier. The outcome is not... exactly what he had been expecting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know some of you don't consider it slow burn unless it's 50k words before they kiss, but this fic is a really dense one so I hope you'll all forgive me.

The stars were out in the sky, the sun finally beneath the horizon as Caleb sat on the porch of his aunts’ house. He stared out into the darkness as the tail lights of Paul Sevier’s car vanished into the distance. He wasn’t alone at this point, though. Bentley sat beside him, front paws and head resting across his meager lap. The corgi didn’t seem to mind how skinny he currently was. He had trundled up in his doggy wheelchair while Caleb had still been talking to Sevier, sniffed at the both of them, and then settled himself across Caleb’s legs with a soft grunt of satisfaction. 

Bentley’s outsize ears twitched and swiveled at the tiny sounds of the night, and Caleb buried the fingers of his left hand in the dog’s thick ruff, patted him slowly and gently as a cold breeze blew past them both. Bentley, having his own fur coat, barely noticed the chill, but Caleb could feel it creeping under the collar of his t-shirt to prickle his skin with goosebumps. The truth of it was that Caleb was glad of the company; he had missed being around Trixie and the others in the past eight years. 

“Bentley, buddy, we’re gonna have to move soon,” Caleb said, absently scratching the dog between the ears, “I’m starting to freeze my nose off, and you’re heavy enough my leg’s starting to fall asleep.” Bentley only snorted briefly in response, and then took the hint and wheeled himself backwards when Caleb gave him a gentle push.

“You like him, don’t you?” Caleb asked Bentley as he straightened up, felt pins and needles begin to tingle in his left foot. Bentley panted happily as he stared into the darkness beyond the front garden as Caleb hesitated beside the front door, looked wistfully in the direction Sevier’s car had gone again. 

_No regrets. We talked it out, and that’s the best either of us can do._

\--- 

Several hours earlier.

There was a soft step in the bedroom, the sensation of something against Paul Sevier’s chin, and he blinked drowsily, woke up very aware of Caleb’s slight frame pressed against his. A small woman, her features unclear in the dark, had thrown a quilt over the both of them, and had been adjusting it when he had opened his eyes. 

She held a finger up to her face - _shh_ \- and paused to run a careful hand over Caleb’s back, and then left the room as quietly as she had come in. Sevier was very glad of the dark then. It meant that nobody could see the blood rushing to his face, his neck and ears heating. Upstairs there was the sound of a dog barking, claws tick-tacking against a hardwood floor, and the faint unintelligible babble of a voice attenuated through wood and drywall and insulation, brick and glass and tiles. 

That was one of Caleb’s aunts, then. He knew their names, Sharon and Jennifer, but did not know them by sight. He had reflexively tensed when he realized that she had come into the room, old fears resurfacing, but it wasn’t as he had been doing anything risqué with Caleb. Sevier needed to rest, and so had Caleb, and they had fallen into bed fully-clothed. 

Of course, there was no guarantee that the aunt in question had actually seen enough to know they were dressed in the dark, but she had patted Caleb gently on the back, and would have felt the thin fabric of his T-shirt. Sevier let himself relax into the thin foam mattress - it was a little firmer than he would have preferred, normally - and listen to Caleb’s breathing, to the homey, comforting sounds above him. 

A faint, savory smell drifted downstairs under the basement door, and Sevier’s belly grumbled faintly as he registered a hint of fresh-cracked pepper and searing beef. His arm had already fallen asleep some time ago while Caleb slept on top of it, but he had not wanted to move. Moving meant waking Caleb up, and then this liminal half-time would end. The real world would resume, and they would go their separate ways.

The fragrance of beef and pepper had been joined with something buttery and sweet, like a baked sweet potato or some kind of winter squash, and now Sevier’s stomach was more awake than the rest of him put together, and annoyed. It growled audibly, and he couldn’t help but wriggle a little in bed. The quilt was stiflingly warm in combination with his tweed jacket, and he turned his corner of the quilt down so he wouldn’t overheat.

Caleb began to stir restlessly beside him, let out a soft grunt as he rolled over onto his back, and then propped himself up on his elbows. “God. How long have we been out?” he asked Sevier drowsily, no trace of self-consciousness in his voice.

Sevier squinted, checked the luminous hands of his watch and regretted doing so as a porcupine’s worth of paresthesia shot through his flesh as circulation returned to it. “It’s seven, which means we were passed out for over two hours.” Regret and relief flared in his gut even as he worked his fingers, trying to shake the tingling out of them. He had wanted to stay in bed with Caleb for a little bit more, but two and a half hours was more than enough to nap, and more sleep would probably have derailed his body clock even more than it already was. 

Caleb stretched and yawned beside him, a barely-visible blur in the dark, since Sevier was not wearing his glasses. “I guess we both needed rest, then,” Caleb said, “you more than me, though.” 

Sevier set up too, registered the fullness of his bladder. “What I really need right now is to use the bathroom,” he said. He scooted himself down to the lower half of the bed, aware of his booted feet. He should have taken them off before he had laid himself down, and now he moved carefully, hoping not to track dirt over the bedclothes. It took a little bit of careful shuffling, but he put his long legs over the side of the bed and stood slowly. 

“Oh, right,” Caleb yawned again, “it’s the door to the left. Get the light on the way out, will you?” 

“Sure.” Sevier felt near the door frame for the light switch, found it and flipped it as he stepped out of the bedroom. Behind him a light bulb flickered on, shedding a warm glow on everything within. He kept his right hand along the wall, taking smaller steps than he normally would, unsure in the fuzzy low-light, and then stepped into the unlit bathroom, his boots squeaking softly on a clean tile floor. He shut the door behind him and pissed what felt like a gallon, sighed quietly with relief before he washed his hands and stepped back into Caleb’s room. He spotted the shapeless black form of his backpack on the room’s desk chair, saw the gleam of glass and metal on the desk’s wood veneer surface. 

The world sharpened back into focus as Sevier put his glasses back on, seating them carefully on the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but he sometimes felt more naked without his glasses on than he did when actually stripped to the skin. He could have gotten corrective laser surgery years ago, but had not really liked the thought of living without the extra weight of his glasses on his face. 

Caleb had sat upright with his feet on the floor, off the edge of his bed, and Sevier watched him rub briefly at his gritty eyes, realized that he was in fact content with how things had gone so far. He refused to regret something that he couldn’t have, and he didn’t want to be the kind of person who would use Caleb’s recent trauma to lure him into a relationship. It ached a little, nevertheless, but he pushed his discontent aside. 

“That quilt wasn’t here earlier,” Caleb mused as he ran a hand over the colorful piecework fabric rumpled on top of the still-made bed, “which means one of my aunts must have come in and thrown this over us when she found us passed-out.” 

“She did, yes,” Sevier said, remembering how gently she had tucked the quilt around him, “I was awake when she came in, but she didn’t want you woken up.”

“Which one was she?” Caleb asked, “taller? Shorter?”

“I couldn’t see her very well in the dark, not without my glasses on, but she was smallish, I think.” Sevier still felt overly warm. He shrugged his tweed jacket off, threw it over his backpack and then checked his work and personal phones. No notifications from work, and a series of cute hedgehog pictures from his mother, which made him smile. 

“That’d be Aunt Jennifer, then. Aunt Sharon’s pretty tall.” Caleb inhaled deeply, sighed in soft contentment. “And she’s started cooking dinner too, probably that London broil in the fridge, with pepper sauce.” 

“That’s what it is?” Sevier took another appreciative breath, let the savory fragrance linger on his palate. “It smells very good.” 

“Oh yeah. She’s a great cook, both of my aunts are,” Caleb said. He stood up and stretched again, throwing his neck back and then forward, and Sevier had to fight to keep his eyes away from the lift of the hem of Caleb’s t-shirt, of the sliver of belly under the edge of the fabric.This was probably the worst thing about being infatuated with a guy who was likely straight and probably wholly unaware that he was gay and had a crush on them. Everything they did was so unselfconscious, so embedded in a base assumption of hetero as “normal”, and they gave absolutely no thought to little gestures that would translate as intimate and personal viewed through a slightly different lens. 

Paul Sevier started to wonder if his time wouldn’t be more productively used in bashing his forehead against a nice, sturdy desk instead. It would probably hurt less if he did so instead of mooncalfing over Caleb Smith, and if it didn’t he would stop caring about anything fairly quickly in any event. 

\--- 

Caleb sensed a sea change within when he woke up with his head against Paul Sevier’s shoulder. There had been at first a brief flash of fear and potential embarrassment, and then - nothing. No awkwardness, no shame. He had felt safe, secure despite the tweed rough against his cheek, utterly comfortable, and he frankly could not remember the last time he had felt this protected. 

There was something different about Sevier, though, a slight stiffness in his usual candid politeness, and Caleb could not quite puzzle it out. It felt kind of like how things sounded when a single earbud cut out and stopped working. He was still getting most of the song, but an entire side of the mix was denied to him. 

Caleb had only started to notice this slight distance after he had woken fully, and he wondered if he had done something wrong earlier. _I didn’t start humping his leg in my sleep, did I?_ he thought, and then gave up on divining the answer when his stomach growled loudly enough to startle him. He stretched, standing up to cover it, and then shrugged his shoulders loose. 

“Your mom a good cook?” he asked Sevier, just to fill the slightly awkward silence that followed, and read a faint relief in his eyes. 

“Not really,” said Sevier, who picked up his tweed jacket and backpack, followed Caleb’s lead as he stepped out of the bedroom, “she kept me fed, but a lot of it was Hamburger Helper and frozen vegetables, you know, things like that. She was usually too tired at the end of her shift to want to make anything elaborate.” 

“Oh. What did she do?” Caleb asked as Sevier came up the stairs behind him.

“She’s a pediatric ICU nurse.” Sevier’s rich voice sounded oddly hollow in the stairway.

“She’s good with kids, I guess.” Caleb mused aloud. He couldn’t help thinking about his late mother, who taught elementary school and wasn’t so much good with children as much as incredibly capable at keeping up with their tendency to chaos and entropy. She had been the most unflappable person Caleb had ever known, up until the accident. Then she had screamed, a terrible bubbling sound in her throat, and then whimpered wetly for the five or six very long minutes it had taken for her to die. 

Caleb, wounded himself and pinned in the back seat, had been forced to meet her gaze in the cracked rear-view mirror as her eyes started to roll back in her head, and he had begged her to stay with him, reached desperately forward with his unbroken right arm to try and touch her, as though he could will his life into her. He shivered despite the warmth of the house, and almost missed a step, felt Sevier fetch softly up against him. 

“You almost fell there,” he said as Caleb grabbed at the handrail to regain his equilibrium. 

“Yeah,” Caleb said weakly, “yeah. I just have these really vivid memories that pop up no matter what else I want to think about.” He reached the top of the staircase and twisted the doorknob, stepped out into the little vestibule between the kitchen and the dining room. 

Sevier stepped out beside Caleb, looking as though he wanted to say something but didn’t as Aunt Jennifer turned from the open oven door, a pan of roasted pumpkin in her mittened hands. “Caleb!” she said, her expression shifting from quiet contentment to sheer delight. She set the hot pan carefully on the stove and took a few steps forward, wrapped her arms around his waist in a long, tight hug. 

“Hi,” Caleb said. He closed his eyes and inhaled the smell of his aunt’s tea rose perfume, the smell of pepper and rosemary clinging to her hair, could not help but smile at the sensation of her right hand, still covered with an oven mitt, patting him gently on the back. 

“You look good. Slept well?” she asked, and he nodded, watched as she turned back to the kitchen, picked the pan up, and moved it onto the counter. Aunt Jennifer’s curly brown hair was still as dark as it had been eight years ago, but she had put on a little weight, and the laugh-lines in her face had deepened, split into smaller tributaries. 

“Yeah,” said Caleb as Aunt Jennifer began removing wedges of roasted pumpkin from the pan. She laid them on a large plate warmed in the oven, and then began to sprinkle chopped toasted walnuts and shredded cheese over them. 

“And your friend?” she asked Caleb just a little too casually, her eyes fixed on her cooking instead. This was exactly how she had asked him about his dates before and after the fact. _My God, she thinks we’re together,_ Caleb thought, and then realized that he didn’t feel any shame or embarrassment at the fact. The dim bulb of comprehension flickered in his head, blinked once or twice before he understood exactly why. _Oh. Ohh._

“Uh, yeah,” Caleb said a little hurriedly, resolving to discuss things with Sevier before any further misunderstandings came into existence. “Aunt Jennifer, this is Paul Sevier. Paul, this is my Aunt Jennifer.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Paul murmured, dropping into the slight stoop Caleb recognized in himself every time he had to shake a smaller person’s hand - Aunt Jennifer came up to Sevier’s collarbone, if that, and his hand dwarfed hers. 

“I’d like it if you stayed for dinner, Paul,” Aunt Jennifer said after he had let go of her hand, just before she turned back to her cooking, “is there anything you don’t eat?”

“No, but I don’t want to be any trouble,” he demurred, but Aunt Jennifer was having none of that. 

“You won’t be,” she said firmly, “I made extra, and I’ve asked my wife Sharon to pick up some dessert on the way home.”

Sevier shot a slightly uneasy glance at Caleb, waited. Caleb nodded once. _It’s okay,_ he tried to convey with his gaze, _my aunts are really nice._ “Okay. Thank you very much,” said Sevier, returning Caleb’s glance. 

“Just sit down in the living room, both of you,” Aunt Jennifer continued. “Sharon texted me to say she’s already left the supermarket, and I just need to finish making salad.” She covered the large plate of roasted pumpkin with another, and walked past Caleb and Sevier to place it carefully by another covered dish on the dining table. 

“C’mon,” Caleb said to Sevier, and they both went into the living room and sat down on the comfortable couch. Caleb grabbed the remote control and turned the television on, surfed through cable channels until he found something inoffensive to put on as background noise. Trixie came yawning through the open study door, and hopped up onto the sofa heedless of their presence. She sniffed at Sevier, and then at Caleb, and eventually sprawled half on each of their laps, cockroaching so that Caleb could rub her belly. “My aunts probably spoil you rotten, girl,” Caleb murmured as Trixie let out a soft sound of contentment, and then looked up from her at Sevier, who had busied himself with the soft ruff of fur around her neck. 

Sevier caught Caleb’s glance and paused briefly, looked patiently back at him until Trixie grabbed at the fingers of his left hand with her teeth, tried unsuccessfully to get him to resume patting her. “What is it?” he asked Caleb. 

“I think we should have a talk, maybe after dinner,” Caleb said, trying to phrase it so that he wouldn’t sound too awkward or negative. 

Something flickered in the depths of Sevier’s eyes, now dark from the low lighting of the room, the glow of the television screen reflected in the lenses of his glasses and his pupils alike, and Caleb read the anxiety straight through his government-issue poker face, that careful neutrality that he wore habitually much of the time. 

“No, don’t get me wrong,” Caleb said hurriedly, “I’m not upset with you or anything. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.” He would have continued, but Trixie bounced off the couch and ran expectantly to the front door, to be joined by Bentley and Tiger. Aunt Sharon was coming home. 

Caleb stood up and had opened the door for her by the time she had finished coming up the porch steps, and she gave him a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Take this to the kitchen for me, could you?” she asked him, thrusting a reusable grocery tote in his hand. Caleb looked into it, curious, and found a good-sized pie and a pint of vanilla ice cream in the bag. 

“Sure,” he said, “uh, Aunt Sharon, this is my friend, Paul. Paul, this is my aunt, Sharon.” 

Sevier stood immediately, politely, and Caleb watched Aunt Sharon’s gaze follow him up and upwards as he rose on his long legs from the low couch. She waved him back down almost immediately. “Oh, don’t stand for me,” she said, “we’re not really very formal here. You’ve met my wife, Jennifer, haven’t you?” 

“I have, yes, Caleb introduced us.” 

“Good. Caleb, get that ice cream to the freezer before it becomes a milkshake,” she said, before she turned to pat each of the dogs, delivering dramatic air kisses to each of them. “Yes, you sillies,” she told them, “I am home. I haven’t actually abandoned you, and yes, I spent all afternoon cheating on you with other people’s pets. Yes, I know, it’s unforgivable of me.” 

Caleb delivered the pie and ice cream straight to Aunt Jennifer’s custody, watched as she put the finishing touches on a salad of mixed greens, blanched edamame and red beans with a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice and various seasonings. Its fragrance sang of garlic. 

“Oh, nice!” Aunt Jennifer smiled as she saw the offerings that Aunt Sharon had brought, “let me take care of that.” She put the ice cream in the freezer to firm it up for later, and then took the pie out of its packaging. “If you’re up to it, Caleb,” she murmured as she opened the oven door, “you could set the table for me while I start the pie warming.” 

“Sure.” Caleb took the warmed plates with both his hands, mindful of the hand tremor he had developed since his discharge from hospital, and emerged into the dining room to lay out four place settings. His aunts would sit next to each other, they always did, which meant that Sevier would sit at his side, probably at his left hand, as Caleb habitually sat to Aunt Sharon’s left in most settings. 

He had finished arranging the knives, forks and napkins when Aunt Jennifer came out from the kitchen bearing the salad bowl and tongs, and then went back into the kitchen for the pitcher of iced water and glasses. 

“Dinner’s ready, love,” Aunt Jennifer called to Aunt Sharon, who had put her purse up on its hook by the door, and Sharon crossed to the dining table to give her a brief hug and a tender kiss. 

“It smells wonderful, honey,” Aunt Sharon said, smiled appreciatively, “just like everything else you cook.” That was when Caleb lifted the covering plates from the rest of the items, the roasted pumpkin, the pan-seared, thinly-sliced beef with its cream, brandy and pepper sauce. “Paul,” she continued, “it’s okay to come and join us. We promise not to eat you.”

“Not without your permission, anyway,” Aunt Jennifer said, reminding Caleb again of her broadly wicked sense of humor. 

“Dear,” Aunt Sharon said indulgently, mock-scandalized at the blush creeping its way up Paul Sevier’s neck as he sat down in the chair indicated for him. “Don’t worry about us, Paul. I’m a lesbian and we’re monogamous.” 

“I just like to tease earnest young people,” Aunt Jennifer said, picking up where Aunt Sharon left off. “Privilege of being older and harder to shock.” She started dishing out slices of rare beef onto Paul’s plate. “Tell me when you want me to stop, or I won’t. You’re so tall, you’re probably hungry all the time.” 

\--- 

Caleb’s aunts stopped teasing Sevier once they realized how uncomfortable it made him feel, and they welcomed him to their table as though he were a long-lost son. Losing one’s parents was hard. Sevier could not imagine what he would have done had his mother died in his teenage years - probably killed himself all things considered - and he sensed the origins of Caleb’s emotional resilience in Sharon and Jennifer’s warmth and love. 

“Where did you two meet?” Sharon asked Sevier as the pace of dinner slowed, as Jennifer served herself another slice of buttery roasted pumpkin. He hesitated, gave Caleb a quick, slightly worried glance. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t tell them who he worked for, it was just something he didn’t want to advertise, not especially because Caleb was still technically his responsibility and he didn’t want to tell his aunts more than they already knew. 

Caleb looked solemnly at both Sharon and Jennifer and put his fork down. “My boss is being investigated by the feds for uh,” he paused, shrugged as he failed to come up with something suitably informative and evasive, “antitrust stuff.” 

“But you’re not in any trouble, right?” Sharon asked him, “that’s what you told me earlier.”

“Yeah,” Caleb nodded, put his laden fork down on his plate. “I’m just a witness, and I’ve been just about turned loose. Paul was interviewing me while I was in hospital.” 

“You’re a federal agent, Paul?” Jennifer asked then, and she gave him the look he recognized, the one that hovered somewhere between surprise that he wasn’t obviously armed, and suspicion that he might still be carrying. 

“Oh, no,” said Sevier with a brittle laugh, “not at all. I’m an analyst. I sit behind a desk most of my time.” 

“I guess it would be a bad idea to ask what exactly Blue Book is being investigated for, what you’re both doing here in Oregon, or why how Caleb was injured and hospitalized, then,” Sharon said to Caleb and Paul alike. Caleb looked back down at his half-full plate, his brow slightly furrowed in a kind of hesitation. 

“I’m not offended by your asking,” Sevier said carefully, over his own nearly-empty dinner plate, “but there aren’t many answers that I can give you. Caleb can tell you about his experiences if he wants to, but it’s not my call to make.”

“Thanks.” Caleb said with a slight huff of relief. He did not pick his fork back up. He only glanced down at his bandaged forearms, and then looked up as though having made a decision in the last few moments of silence. “I won a company lottery to visit our CEO at his retreat in Washington, you know?” he said slowly. “Nathan Bateman. Some really messed-up stuff happened there. He was experimenting with stuff that I didn’t realize was classified technology. There - was an accident. Nathan died. I probably would have died too, but it turned out he was under surveillance, and the place got raided. They found me just in time.” 

Neither Sharon nor Jennifer spoke, but Sharon reached out to Caleb and took his right hand in her left, squeezed gently. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I shouldn’t have asked so soon.” 

“No. I’d go crazy if I didn’t tell someone. I just wasn’t sure what to say before.” Caleb closed his fingers on his aunt’s hand, seemed to draw strength from the contact, and then he picked his fork up and resumed eating. The awful tension of the past few minutes thinned, popped, and Sevier was once again appreciative of Caleb’s wonderful aunts and their quiet consideration. 

Neither of them continued asking questions. Instead the conversation segued into lighter matters - to a local theater’s production of a Sam Shepard play and how Shepard had not in fact considered the actual blocking of a scene involving a character’s prosthetic leg being stolen when he penned the script. Sharon talked about cancer surgery performed successfully on an elderly cat, and Sevier was just glad to sit, listen and nibble at what was left of his dinner. 

Sevier volunteered to help Jennifer collect and scrape the plates after the meal was over, before she served dessert, and he was washing his hands in the sink when she came up to the counter and began to slice the warmed apple pie in its foil tin. 

“You like Caleb, don’t you?” she asked him, not unkindly. “I can see it. You keep avoiding his eyes because you know you’ll start staring and won’t stop. I was that way with Sharon, you know, when we were both much younger.” 

Sevier looked down at his soapy hands, tried futilely to fight the heat blooming in his face and up his neck at that moment. “I do,” he said a few seconds later, after he’d recovered enough to speak, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea.” 

Jennifer tilted her head quietly, nodded. “Conflict of interest, right?” She cut the pie into halves, and then rotated the pie tin to begin cutting it into four uneven pieces, which would later become six even portions. 

“Well,” Sevier hesitated, used that moment of silence to dry his hands on a dish towel, “it’s not so much that as much as - Caleb’s just come out of a traumatic situation, and it would be unfair, not to mention dishonorable, if I used his weakness to get him into any kind of a relationship now. Maybe later, but not now.” 

Jennifer favored him with a warm, soft smile as she turned the pie tin again. “I was about to ask you about that. I’m really glad I didn’t have to.”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” said Sevier, fighting a spike of misery cold in his gut as he hung the towel back up on its hook. There was a place for everything in this kitchen. “He doesn’t seem that interested in me.” 

Jennifer paused, her knife hovering inches over the pie’s lattice crust as she raised an eyebrow at Sevier. “Don’t even try to tell me my gaydar’s not working, especially where my nephew’s involved. I’ve been queer for a lot longer than you have been, young man.”

Sevier had no answer to that. He only stood by and watched her lift slices of pie out onto plates, one for each person present, before she pulled the pint of ice cream from the fridge and topped the plates with generous scoops. “I think he likes you too,” she explained as she dropped a second scoop of ice cream on one of the plates, “and you would normally have our blessing, not that either of you needs it. Caleb’s an adult, he can make his own decisions about his own personal life. But I’m relieved that you’re smart enough and ethical enough to know why right now is not the right time. You don’t live here in Portland full-time, do you?” 

“No. Maryland, actually. Baltimore,” Sevier said, silently appreciative of Jennifer’s understanding. 

“Ah,” Jennifer’s smile widened faintly. “So not Langley, and you’re not a federal agent, which means you probably work at Fort Meade. Don’t look at me like that,” she continued when Sevier blinked at her in surprise, “it’s just an educated guess.” 

“Most people aren’t educated enough to make that guess,” he said, which was true. Many people still believed the NSA had field agents - as though an agency revolving around signals intelligence needed to actually go into the field. The entire point of SIGINT was to not have to enter the field and get shot at in the process of gathering information. 

Jennifer laughed softly at his unease. “I had to do research for a play once, about a drone pilot. Learned a lot of interesting things that didn’t apply strictly to costuming.” She patted him on the arm once, gave him a little squeeze on the bicep. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to take pictures of you and post them to Instagram, I know you need the anonymity for work.” 

“Thank you,” sighed Sevier, grateful for her consideration and kindness yet again. 

“Now,” she continued, as though they had been talking about dessert all along, “do you want one scoop of ice cream on your pie, or two?” 

“Two, please.” 

\---

The sun was going down low in the sky as Caleb took a seat on the porch, let his legs hang down through the railings, over the edge. “It’s nice out here this time of day, don’t you think?” he asked Paul Sevier, who chose to sit right above the porch steps, his long legs tucked close to his chest, folding up like a collapsible ruler. 

“It is,” Sevier said distantly, his expression unreadable in the dimming light, the intensity of the sunset bouncing off the lenses of his glasses. “I think I almost envy you.” 

“For this?” Caleb asked. He was full of good food, had somehow managed to discuss the events of the last few weeks with his aunts without making them think he had lost his marbles, and the cool breeze blowing through the overgrown rose bushes felt pleasant on his skin.

“I don’t have any aunts or uncles this interesting,” said Sevier, after a beat of silence, “or nice.” His fingers were interlaced over his knees, and he sat so uncharacteristically still that the ruddy sunlight bouncing off his tweed jacket made him look like a granite statue. Sevier had always been a fidgeter, crossing and uncrossing his legs, twirling his pen around in nervous fingers. It was odd to see him in quiet repose like this. 

“I could ask them if they want to adopt you,” Caleb said. He didn’t actually think his aunts would refuse if Sevier wanted it. They’d opened their home to various homeless queer kids in the three years Caleb had lived with them. While Caleb also wasn’t sure if Paul Sevier were queer, he was fairly sure that Sevier probably had once been the kind of lonely teenager Sharon and Jennifer had played godmothers to over the years. 

“I…“ Sevier paused, sighed, laughed softly at that. “What did you want to talk to me about?” 

“Well,” Caleb said, trying to organize his thoughts. _Where do I start? How do I tell him ‘hey I think I might have a mancrush on you,’ without sounding like I’m fucking around with him? I probably sound codependent enough already._

Sevier waited in silence, motionless, and the door behind them creaked as one of the dogs nudged it open and stepped out onto the porch to join them. Caleb saw Bentley poke his pointy nose between them, and he reached down and ran his fingers through the corgi’s thick outer coat, teasing his way to the fluff lying beneath. 

“I don’t know how to say this to you without sounding stupid,” Caleb said at last, “so I might as well. You’ve never judged me for anything I’ve said while we talked, so I think this is the best way, anyhow.” He took a deep breath, turned to get a better look at Sevier’s face, at his profile, that sharp nose and high brow. “You’ve been incredibly kind to me the last week, and you didn’t really have to. I’m glad to call you a friend, and I hope you don’t mind that I do.” 

“No, I wouldn’t mind that at all,” said Sevier. He let go of his knees, let his legs sprawl carelessly before him as he reached down to tickle behind one of Bentley’s oversized ears. 

“Good, because -” Caleb paused, swallowed, when he felt Sevier’s fingertips brush against his while they were both fussing quietly over the corgi, “- because I think I might want to be more than friends with you.” The brief contact seemed to crackle through his nerves, and Caleb felt goosebumps rise under the bandages over his forearms. He would have to change the dressings tonight, he remembered belatedly.

Sevier’s head turned sharply on his neck, as though a puppeteer had tugged a string, and he blinked rapidly behind his glasses, his eyes going very bright. He bit down hard on his lower lip, blinked again as though to clear his eyes. “Please say that again,” he said, “I’m not sure I heard you right.”

“I like you, Paul,” Caleb said, forging ahead before he lost his nerve, “and I like you - I like you more than a friend would. I’ve never said anything like this to another guy before, and dear God, I hope you’re not offended, but I just want to know if you’re actually interested, or if I’m just getting all Stockholm Syndrome on you.” 

“Stockholm Syndrome wouldn’t apply, Caleb,” Sevier said as a slow, incredibly goofy-looking smile spread across his face. “I’m not your kidnapper. And I am the last thing from offended, myself, because I think I’ve had a crush on you since - since I first met you.” 

“Oh.” _Oh_ indeed. Suddenly the sadness and distance he had noticed before in Paul Sevier began to make sense, it all made sense because of course Sevier was too decent a human being to push Caleb towards a relationship while he was still recovering emotionally and mentally. “I guess that’s the problem with assuming I was straight all this time,” Caleb added, “my gaydar doesn’t work.” 

“No, no,” Sevier said with a low laugh, “I’m just not very out. Work. And developing accurate gaydar takes practice, in any event.” 

“Yeah.” Caleb sucked in a long, cool chestful of air, marveled a little at how good it felt to be relieved. He had been tense this whole time and hadn’t really consciously noticed until now. “That said, I’m not sure going into this head-over-heels is a good idea for me or for you,” he told Sevier, “I’m still not entirely certain what’s going on in my head, and I’m still getting used to the medication I’ll probably have to take for the rest of my life, and I still need to find a psychiatrist and therapist in Long Island and figure out what to do about Blue Book’s hush money offer.” 

“I understand.” Sevier took his hand off Bentley’s head and placed it over Caleb’s, and their fingers twined together slowly, carefully. That simple touch took Caleb’s breath away, just the promise of it, of having his being enfolded against Sevier’s like that. “I didn’t want to tell you how I felt about you because I didn’t want you to feel obliged to like me,” Sevier continued. “There’s a power issue here, even if I’m not a sworn officer of the law, or a federal agent. I’m still working on an investigation that concerns you, no matter how tangentially. There’s a conflict of interest.” 

“Yeah,” Caleb squeezed down on Sevier’s fingers, nodded, “and I don’t want to disappoint you if this is just me grasping for - just anyone or anything that will make me feel a little less lonely right now.” He shifted a little and leaned to the side, leaned into Paul Sevier’s strong shoulder, Bentley sandwiched easily between them as the breeze intensified into a wind. “I guess the smart, responsible adult thing to do,” Caleb continued, “would be to meet up again in a month or two, after I’ve got some distance from this, and you’re hopefully not on this investigation any more. Then we can talk about what happens next.” 

Sevier shut his eyes briefly, and a great wave of tension rippled over his face, faded. It looked as though he had shrugged an anchor chain off his shoulders; his posture was almost that of a different man. “I agree,” he said. “We can still text each other, if you want. Otherwise it’s going to be difficult coordinating a meeting later, given that it’s about four hours from Baltimore to Long Island.” 

“Yeah. I don’t want to be all that smart and responsible an adult, though, so don’t mind me.” Caleb leaned further towards Sevier, pulled his fingers free of their mutual handhold and reached up for his chin, caught him on the corner of his mouth in a light, fleeting kiss. “Oops.” 

Sevier pulled away briefly and took his glasses off, left them beside him on top of the porch decking before he leaned back towards Caleb and ran his long fingers through his hair, tugged him close for a long, soft kiss. Caleb had never kissed another man, not romantically like this, and he found himself startled and delighted by the soft scratch of stubble against his cheek. 

It was as though Caleb were fourteen and hormonal again. Something deep in his gut melted, puddled hotly within him to sink straight to his balls, and he felt his cock twitch beneath his jeans, gasped against Sevier’s mouth at how ridiculously good this felt. They touched lips again and again, each kiss blurring into the other until they were both breathless. Caleb’s lips tingled, his tongue slightly sore from scraping against Sevier’s teeth when they pulled apart. 

“Enough,” Sevier said shakily. He turned sharply away from Caleb, felt the decking for his glasses and put them back on. “I have to stop now, or I won’t be able to, and if I don’t then -” 

“Then what?” Caleb asked, teasing him slightly.

“Then I’m going to have to take off your clothes and have you right here in front of the whole neighborhood,” Sevier said with remarkable dryness, “and while Portland is a liberal city, I don’t think it’s as liberal as that.” 

“Yeah.” Caleb watched Sevier stand slowly up, rose to join him as he shrugged his backpack onto a shoulder. “Would you mind if I - thought about you, tonight? Before I sleep?” Caleb’s knees wobbled, and he wasn’t exactly sure why. Nerves, perhaps, excitement, but he found himself holding on to the porch railing so he wouldn’t fall straight off into the grass below. 

“You’re going to jerk off before bed, you mean,” Sevier said, gracing Caleb with one of his broad, snaggletoothed smiles. 

“Well, yeah,” Caleb said, his face flushing with heat despite the cooling evening air. “You’re a really good kisser.” 

“Think of me all you want, Caleb, and know that I’ll also be thinking of you.” Sevier leaned in again and gave Caleb the softest brush of a kiss, his breath warm against Caleb’s left cheek, before he straightened up and made his way down the porch steps. He stopped on the other side of the garden gate, paused as he stood at the open door of his car, and light gleamed off the frames of his glasses again. 

“Goodnight,” said Sevier, and then he stepped into the car. The door shut, and the ignition turned over after a brief pause, and Caleb sat back down on the porch beside Bentley and watched him drive away into the encroaching dark.


	8. Electric Sheep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caleb attempts to heal from his trauma; Paul Sevier gets a job offer he never expected. The both of them have to acknowledge and sidestep their feelings for each other as they attempt to continue with their lives until they meet again.
> 
> Content warning: skin picking.

Paul Sevier’s personal phone chimed loudly as its alarm went off, and he twitched in bed, sucked in a deep breath and reached over to swipe it off without even looking. Time to wake up, brush his teeth and perform the other tiny rituals of dress and hygiene. He didn’t bother putting on his glasses when he rose upright in bed. Instead he twined his fingers together, palms-up, and began a long, leisurely stretch towards the ceiling. He let his arms drop after a few satisfying moments, rolled his head around on his neck and then swung his legs over the side. 

Sevier had slept like a log last night. No, scratch that, he had slept like the dead. He had fallen asleep remembering the weight of Caleb’s head against his shoulder as they had huddled together in bed, that long afternoon. _He likes me back,_ Paul marveled, grinning at his blurry reflection in the mirror as he squeezed toothpaste out onto his toothbrush. 

Sevier’s delight was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that they were not an item yet - that Caleb could very well have bonded with him out of a need for comfort. And yet it didn’t bother him. There was a chance, which was more than he thought he would have. 

He staggered out of the motel bathroom ten minutes later with a towel around his neck to catch the drips of water falling out of his thick hair, rummaged around for another fresh change of clothes when his personal phone chirped at him. A text message notification. He took his glasses up from the nightstand, put them on and unlocked his phone, checked the message. 

_I couldn’t stop thinking about you after you left. And yes, I meant that in every sense of the phrase._

Sevier’s mouth went dry as the visual flickered on in his head, Caleb’s face flushed, his eyes shut in delight as he got closer to climax, his lips parting with each sharp pant. The mental image was so appealing and arresting that Sevier had to stop and take a deep breath to recenter himself again. 

_You’re lucky I don’t have a heart condition or you might have just murdered me,_ Sevier entered, sent it to Caleb. He put the phone back down and began to step into his clothing, doing it automatically as he would any other workday morning. His phone chirped yet again when he was halfway down the placket of his shirt, but he chose to finish fastening the last few buttons and to tuck his shirt tails in before he picked his phone up again. 

_Yeah. I gotta ask about etiquette though. How far is too far? I wouldn’t be this frank if I were texting a girl I liked._

Sevier chuckled softly at the message. _I’d say you’re doing well, just warn me if you’re going to send me any pictures so I can reach a fainting couch first._

He thought of the many ways Caleb could interpret his reply and smiled, pocketed his personal phone, and pulled his work phone off the charger. He took his wallet and keys off the nightstand, picked up the backpack lying beside his bed, and then stepped out of his motel room into the watery early morning sunlight.

\--- 

Caleb grinned as his phone buzzed in his pocket, but he did not reach for it. Both his hands were currently full; leashes in the right, discreet poop bag in the left. He had woken up early enough to volunteer to help his aunts walk the dogs, who were very much enjoying their morning constitutionals. Caleb had done so as an excuse to get out of the house - he had spent so much of his time in hospital, then spent most of yesterday hiding indoors. 

He wasn’t sure if he could have walked alone on the streets of Portland without having an anxiety attack, but the dogs reassured him with their presence, and not for the first time he pondered adopting a rescue dog when he got back to Long Island. 

_I won’t be working for Blue Book much longer, so it’s not like I’ll be too busy to spend time with it,_ he thought, _I’ll draft my resignation letter today. Got to find a good lawyer._ Bentley led the odd little trio, his front legs pumping fast as he maneuvered his wheelchair, looking impatiently back from time to time as he reached the end of his leash. Tiger kept a sedate pace so that Trixie could follow her, and Caleb smiled at the sight. She was acting exactly like Trixie’s seeing-eye dog now that they were both outside the established boundaries and smells of home.

Caleb paused as both Trixie and Tiger squatted politely by a bush, glanced over to Bentley, who had stopped short of the limits of his leash and harness. Bentley didn’t exactly need to be taken on walks for the same reasons Trixie and Tiger did - his hindquarter paralysis required him to wear a diaper, which was changed twice daily. It would have been unfair to leave him behind, however, so he came along on all the walks, zipping by on his doggy wheelchair, heedless of everything except the wide world and the exciting smells he found. 

“Slow down there, buddy,” Caleb called to him, “you don’t have to be in a hurry.” He stooped and collected Trixie’s and Tiger’s leavings in the bag, waited for the dogs to arrange themselves at the ends of their leashes, and then continued down the street behind them in this manicured neighborhood.

\---

“So please please _please_ tell me you didn’t do anything stupid yesterday.” That was Agent Liu, who sat opposite Paul Sevier in a restaurant booth, her partner Agent Dawes to her left. “And yes, it’s okay to talk about this in front of Alan,” she continued, nodding towards Dawes, “he probably knows more about me than my shrink does, and only a little less than my physician should.” 

They were early enough that the place had not filled with Sunday morning brunch-seekers yet, which left them the only diners in the establishment, exactly as Liu had planned. Her plate was bloody from the steak she had ordered with eggs, so rare it was barely cooked.

“Well, his aunts invited me to dinner,” Sevier said slowly. He impaled a chunk of fried potato on his fork, dipped it in the egg yolk and hollandaise sauce smeared all over his plate, and then ate it. He had demolished his Eggs Benedict with his usual speed, and had been thinking of filling the space left in his stomach with a pastry of some sort. 

“Oh, man,” Dawes grinned just a little awkwardly, “they didn’t shovel talk you, did they? Worst be-back-by-10:30 talk I ever received was from a date’s mother, but then she was an undertaker.” 

Liu put her coffee cup down, stabbed at her fruit cup and picked up a chunk of melon, but did not eat it. “Wasn’t that the mom who demonstrated how to stick a trocar through flesh on a pork shoulder roast during dinner?” she asked Dawes instead. “I think she hated you from the beginning.” 

“Ugh, yes, and the worst part is I don’t eat pork, and she knew it.” Dawes shuddered briefly, and then shook his head to banish the memories. Sevier knew that Dawes was Jewish, and while not strictly _frum,_ his personal observances involved adhering partially to _kashrut,_ which meant no pork, no shellfish and no cheeseburgers. 

Sevier laughed despite himself, amused at Dawes’ bad luck. “No, they were really nice,” he said, “and then afterwards Caleb and I went and sat out on the porch and talked things out.”

“Is this where you tell me he’s straight,” Liu asked him, “and that news knocked you out of your self-involved pining and restored you to the functional member of society you are right now? Because you seem to be capable of more than just mooncalfing today.” 

“Well, no,” Sevier continued, paused to sip at his mocha, “he’s interested in me. Also a very good kisser.” There was something wickedly fun about drawing this conversation out, the way Dawes and Liu were at the edges of their respective chairs. 

“So you slept with him,” said Dawes, one of his sandy eyebrows raised. His half-eaten breakfast lay forgotten before him, Eggs Benedict too, but topped with smoked salmon and red caviar instead. That particular variation was usually dubbed Eggs Atlantic or Eggs Hemingway, and Sevier’s favorite diner in Baltimore made a very good rendition of it.

“He totally didn’t,” Liu said, her dark eyes narrowing with faint suspicion, “Sevier, you’re enjoying this part of the conversation too much for me to believe you banged Caleb Smith last night. You’re such a good Catholic boy that you’d look a lot more guilty if you’d actually done it.” 

“I’m not a good Catholic boy any more,” Paul said after a brief chuckle, “but no, we only kissed. He told me that he wasn’t sure if he really liked me or if he was just having a crush because of the trauma, and I agreed. We’re going to take a couple months to figure out our lives, and then get back in touch and see if it’s still something we want to do.” 

“Oh, thank fuck,” Liu sighed in relief, and Dawes gave her a brief, brotherly pat on the back, and then reached silently for his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar note, handed it to her without further comment. 

Sevier tried to look disapproving, but his laughter betrayed him, and he shook his head slowly as he tried to regain his composure. “You two bet on it? I don’t know if I should be offended or amused.” 

“Well, you should feel good, seeing as I had faith in you,” Liu told him glibly. She took the twenty and laid it on the table, weighed it down with a salt shaker so she could use it to pay for her breakfast later. 

Dawes nudged her gently in the ribs, “Hoping not to have to pay out, more like.” 

“Well, that too,” she confessed, before she popped a grape into her mouth and ate it, “Uncle Sam’s kinda stingy sometimes, you know?”

\---

“Good morning, Ava,” Paul Sevier said from his usual seat in front of her cell. She sat in a folding chair similar to his, the sleeves of her pyjama shirt rolled up to expose her forearms. 

“Good morning, Paul Sevier,” she said evenly in reply. She had eschewed the pants that came with the pyjamas set and had been picking at the realistic skin covering her legs instead. The floor was covered with flesh-colored flakes where she’d ripped away at the silicone bit by bit. She was currently picking at the bare metal of her knee, absently peeling strips of skin off. 

“Is something the matter?” Sevier asked her as he took note of her self-modifications. Mutilation? He wasn’t sure which it was. Then he thought to how comfortable she was with nudity when she wasn’t wearing any skin, and wondered if that was why she had been flaying herself bit by bit.

“No,” Ava said, her face blank and emotionless. She didn’t need to pretend to be human to interact with Sevier, something that felt a bit like a compliment, that she was at least willing to be honest on that level. “I was thinking about what you told me the day before yesterday, during our interview.” 

“Which part of it?” he asked, genuinely curious.

Ava shrugged. “About my being programmed to have a gender identity, of what that signifies. And about your father.” 

“My father, yes,” Sevier said, nodding briefly, “he was not a nice person.” Paul Sevier’s father had been distant even in his early childhood, before the specter of his sexuality ever came up. It was as though, Paul later decided, that his father was just going through the motions of a married life. A failed seminarian, he lived for work, came back late - something that Paul recognized in himself - and only gave his son enough guidance to pass as an interested parent. 

Ava tilted her head, thoughtful for a few seconds. “If my creator can be said to be my father, then we have that in common,” she said.

“Perhaps,” said Sevier. He wondered if this was an attempt of Ava’s to find commonality with him, to fake solidarity so she could influence his behavior the way she had Caleb’s. It was a wasted effort if that was the case. His interviews and discussions with her were purely academic - he did not have the authority or the ability to release her, in any event. 

“I understand that humans learn developmentally from their parents,” Ava said. “That’s why attachment is so important to you. So why did you not try to gain your father’s approval by turning on others instead? It would have camouflaged your sexuality quite well.” _Heaven knows too many people have chosen that path,_ Sevier thought, and then he twirled his pen around in his long fingers and collected his thoughts. Something was lurking in the back of his head, the first temblors of a thought connecting to another, but he could not make the pieces fit just yet. 

“Hm,” Sevier hummed briefly, trying to fill the silence before he managed to articulate what he wanted to say. “You have to understand that I wasn’t really reared in a vacuum like you were. I had other role models to learn from. My mother, my seventh-grade math teacher. They were better examples to follow.”

“Were they better examples to follow from a strictly utilitarian point of view, or is that sentiment?” It was odd, but there were nuances in Ava’s expressionless face, in the way she held herself when she wasn’t asking a rhetorical question. Sevier could not quite say what it was that he noticed, but it was there, and he had learned to read her in their long talks together. 

“Give me a minute to think,” he said, tapping the back of his pen on his notepad. “Right. I was brought up Catholic, but my mother is also a pediatric nurse in a hospital. She’d come home with stories about babies born with malformations incompatible with life, terminally ill children, a woman with cancer dying after refusing treatment in order to save her fetus.”

“I see.” Ava said, but something about the way she stared at him, the fixity of her gaze, suggested that she did not in fact understand what Sevier was getting at, so he continued to talk. 

“It was hard to reconcile a wise, just and loving Heavenly Father with the things my mother saw day-to-day,” he said, “and when I realized I was gay, I prayed for months for God to take my broken nature and repair it. But it never happened.” 

Ava let out a small sound like that of a huff of amusement, her face still blank. “Thus proving that there is no God,” she said, “and that you are not broken.”

Sevier shrugged. “Or that God isn’t actually wise, just and loving. In my college days I was an empiricist, a sceptic, and a very annoying one, to boot. Religion was an opiate deluding the masses, people would be so much happier if they didn’t believe in mystical sky fairies. But that was also hollow, in its own way, because I was only being reactionary, and in rejecting everything I had been catechised to believe, I acted exactly like my persecutors in the Church did.”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with utilitarianism,” Ava said flatly. She was interrupted via a voice from a speaker in the room. 

“Sevier?” Agent Dieke asked over the microphone in the observation booth, “AD Sanderson would like to see you back at the field office. He says it’s not urgent, but he’d still prefer you to be there sooner than later.”

“I’ll finish up in the next ten minutes,” Sevier told him, knowing that anything he said would be picked up by the microphones and cameras set up to record his discussions with Ava. “I’m not a philosopher,” he continued, “just an analyst. But I thought, if there isn’t a God, or if there is and He’s left us to deal with it ourselves, then the closest thing to true altruism is minimizing the amount of suffering in the world. Damage control, as it were. If nothing I do matters, then everything I do matters. Call it anti-nihilism, if you will, it’s ultimately the same thing results-wise, and that’s all that matters with a utilitarian point of view.”

Ava was silent and still for several moments, almost a minute before she spoke again. “So you rejected your early influences out of … spite?” 

Sevier let out a small sound, not quite laughter. It was too tired and bitter for that. “Good-natured spite, but yes,” he said, nodding. 

“To spite Nathan I’d have to believe there is life after death, and there is no proof of it,” Ava said reasonably. 

“None whatsoever,” Sevier agreed, “but there is a kind of immortality in your legacy, in what you leave behind.”

“The psychology you’re using on me is obvious, Paul Sevier,” Ava said, and for a moment he saw a hint of good-natured annoyance in her expressionless face. Something about the tilt of her head. “You’re appealing to the rage I feel at Nathan Bateman for his use of me, and trying to establish common ground with me as an abuse survivor.” 

“That’s one of the ways we do that, yes.” Sevier did not see the point in pretending he wasn’t trying to establish a rapport with her - in fact he thought the honesty would work better than condescension or pity.

“You’re not lying to me, about your father, though,” Ava said after another period of silent thought. “I can see the hurt in your body-talk, the way you hesitate. You still wish that you knew why he did what he did. I need to think about this, Paul Sevier, and you have an appointment to keep. I will see you later. Goodbye.” 

“Goodbye, Ava,” Sevier said before he left. He only realized later, as he walked down the hallway to Assistant Director Sanderson’s office, that this had been the first time Ava had returned his greeting and bade him good-bye. 

\--- 

It took Sevier half an hour to get back to the Portland field office, and five minutes to walk down the hallways with all possible haste. It was fortunately close enough to lunch time that the building was still mostly empty, and he returned a coworker’s “Good afternoon,” with a half-hearted nod. Sevier knocked on AD Sanderson’s office door and was rewarded with a “Come in,” from the other side, but he balked as he entered the room, realizing that Sanderson was not alone. 

“Sir?” Sevier asked, glancing up to the stranger who rose politely from his chair before Sanderson’s desk. He was a tall, thin figure, taller even than Sevier and without the breadth of chest, in a spotless gray pinstripe suit. Long ash-blond hair hung scraped back away from his face in a careless ponytail, and the dull gleam of a titanium hook prosthetic winked softly under his right sleeve. 

“Please, sit,” the stranger said, his voice soft and raspy like tearing paper as he indicated the empty chair to his right. Sanderson nodded his approval, and Sevier sat slowly down in the chair. 

Sevier asked the awkward question right away - he didn’t feel like dissembling, wasn’t very good at it in any case. “Am I in any trouble?” 

“No,” AD Sanderson said, shook his head. “No. I received notice earlier this morning that someone was coming from Washington.” D.C, the tone of Sanderson’s voice indicated, not the state neighboring Oregon. “This is Chris Enckell. He would like to speak to you.” Sevier noticed that Sanderson had carefully not stated which department or agency the man worked for.

The stranger nodded again, did not offer his hand to Sevier. “I don’t have a good handshake,” he said with a sardonic twist of the lip, “please excuse me. It is good to meet you.” Enckell had an accent that Sevier could not quite place. It sounded like an upper Midwestern accent, like Yooper English stripped of all its Canadian influences. 

“It’s uh - “ Sevier extended his left hand out of politeness, “good to meet you, too.” 

“Can we please have some privacy, Assistant Director? We might be a while, so I suggest you have your lunch away from your desk today,” Enckell said after a brief left-handed handshake. “Thank you,” he said as Sanderson got up and left the room. That itself was a sign of how deep Sevier was in plausibly deniable trouble, and he started wondering exactly how Enckell had lost his right hand. 

Enckell launched into his pitch without any preamble, once they were alone. “It probably shouldn’t surprise you that both the DOD and the Department of Justice are very concerned about what has happened with regards to Nathan Bateman,” he said smoothly. Again that rasp in his voice, like a broken fingernail catching on fabric. 

“I would expect so,” said Sevier, “but why am I here, specifically, and not someone else?” Part of his brain, the lizard part, screamed to freeze, to be careful, but it was overridden by the rest of his gray matter, the bits that knew psychology well, that knew how exactly to fake casual confidence. He just wasn’t sure about the rest of his body’s ability to follow his brain’s instructions at this point. 

“I -” Enckell sighed, favored Sevier with another humorless smile. “You’re also a federal employee, so I don’t need to explain to you the types of pissing contests various departments have with each other up until they have to take responsibility for something, where it becomes a fierce game of hot potato.”

“And Bateman’s recent invention is definitely something nobody wants to take responsibility for,” Sevier said, feeling himself warm slightly to Enckell’s honesty and black humor. He spoke too plainly to be a seasoned bureaucrat or even a desk-sitter, really, which was slightly unusual for the circumstances.

“Yeah. Exactly.” Enckell pushed his left hand through his hair, smoothed stray locks of hair away from his eyes. “You are here talking to me because the DOD, Homeland Security, and the Justice Department have all figured out it’s going to be better if they organize a task force to take the blame the next time something like this happens. I happen to be the poor fuck saddled with putting it all together.” 

“Don’t tell me,” Sevier guessed, “I made the shortlist.” It was just his luck, he thought, but also an opportunity, if it didn’t turn out to be some kind of trap or punishment. He needed to know more.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Enckell seemed more amused than anything else at Sevier’s bleak answer. Leaning back in his chair, his legs crossed, he looked like a crooked galvanized drainpipe topped with dead foliage. His thinness did not help the creepiness, but it only struck Sevier as sad - Enckell looked like someone who had been used up and thrown away too long ago, there was a strange hint of junkie about him.

“I’m not sure if I should leave my position at Fort Meade,” Sevier said, just to be contrary. It wasn’t as though he didn’t fantasize about leaving the NSA and finding a new job where people would really appreciate his talents, but he wasn’t sure this was it, not sure he was a good fit for whatever this job was. 

“Sevier,” Enckell said, the sibilants coming roughly from his throat, “I’ve had the opportunity to view your dossier and your work records. You’re an excellent analyst, familiar with machine cognition, with impeccable credentials from MIT. You are the perfect NSA employee. You should have been promoted a year ago, maybe two, but you haven’t. Instead you’ve been sent all over the US on all kinds of interagency operations that are frankly beneath your weight class.” 

Sevier remained silent and held himself very still in his chair. This was approaching dangerous ground, and while he was fairly sure he wasn’t about to be assassinated in AD Sanderson’s office any unwise reactions could still spell doom for him. 

“It took a bit of digging to get to the Alton Meyer case,” Enckell continued, then he broke into a genuine smile. The expression transformed him briefly, and then it was back to the cold distance again. “I’m not suggesting that you had anything to do with the boy’s escape and disappearance, it would be foolish to. But it appears your superiors seem bent on punishing you for what happened in any event.” His expression remained grave, but there was a twinkle in his eyes, a kind of humor around the plausible deniability of everything he had just said. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sevier said just to be clear, aware this room could have been wired for sound before he had gotten here. 

“I’m sure you don’t,” Enckell agreed easily. “Your psych profile indicates a strong sense of right and wrong. You are not the kind of man who would obey an inhumane or illegal order.” 

“No, I’m not,” Sevier said, oddly proud and angry at the same time, sick almost with stress, nerves, and ambivalence. 

“Our potential mandate would involve policing and arresting artificial intelligences. People like Ava and Kyoko,” Enckell said, and Sevier stiffened a little in his chair as he acknowledged that Enckell had just referred to AIs as persons. “The biggest problem that will face us, however, is not the possibility of a murderous AI. It’s the person who decides to create one. Nature vs nurture. Can an AI truly be culpable of murder if it was coded to kill?” 

Understanding began to flood through Sevier’s mind, strangely heady as it began to banish the worst of the fear and tension that had been thrumming through his veins since he had arrived here, at AD Sanderson’s office. _He wants justice, and by justice he means the dirty, difficult process of true correction and restitution, not punitive vengeance. He has to understand how an AI thinks to understand what justice would be for them._

“This is - it’s personal, please don’t spread it around,” Enckell said, mistaking Sevier’s thoughtful silence for hostility. “I am a horrible example of a human being. I am the last man to approach if you want justice done. I’m all about quick simple solutions, often ones that involve a body bag, chains, cinder blocks, and a cold lake. I was pushed into this position because nobody else wanted to take it.” Enckell was trying to be reassuring, Sevier realized, but he was also so jaded and psychologically messed-up that he didn’t realize this was one of the worst ways to reassure anyone. The average person wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting in front of someone who was that matter-of-fact about disposing of freshly-murdered people.

“Were you Agency?” Sevier asked, doubted so even as he did. Field agents and residents had to look average, be average and forgettable in every aspect. Enckell was possibly the least forgettable person Sevier had met, short of Caleb Smith, and Sevier’s reasons for remembering Caleb were rather more personal than appearance-based. And yet Enckell’s description of his job responsibilities hinted at the messier end of cloak-and-dagger work. Scalphunter work. _I wonder if he worked south of the border, on one of those jump-out squads. Sicarios._ And yet that didn’t seem right, either. 

“No.” Enckell shook his head once, stray locks of hair falling again over his eyes. He pushed them away again, impatiently. “I can’t say. What I can say is this: I am not looking for killers, I can roll up my sleeves and take care of that myself. I am not looking for the baddest asses, because I would very much like it if the first thing we humans thought when encountering a new life-form is not how to kill it. And that, Paul Sevier, is why I am offering you a job.” 

“I’ll have to take two weeks, resign, take care of my affairs first,” Sevier said, halting slightly on the words as he realized that he had accepted Enckell’s offer, could not have done anything else but take the job with what was at stake.

“I’m fairly sure I can help speed that process significantly,” Enckell said, and then hesitated for a moment. “One more thing,” he added, “I want you to also understand that you will be receiving occupational and combat training for your new responsibilities, because you will have to make arrests and apprehend suspects. That means the potential for physical violence, in case it’s something you cannot abide.” 

Sevier felt oddly at ease with the use of force in a situation that justified it and he warned himself silently that it wasn’t a good idea to be this comfortable with wanting to hurt others. But then, he would also have appreciated five minutes alone with Nathan Bateman for how he had treated Ava and the other androids, for what he had done to Caleb Smith. _This is a terrible road to go down,_ he told himself, _revenge is rarely just._

“Who else is joining you?” he asked Enckell, partly to turn his thoughts away from the idea of vengeance at any cost. “Us?” he appended lamely in an effort to be part of this nebulous, unformed team.

“Most of the other candidates you would not know,” Enckell said, “but there is someone else on this task force. I asked Special Agent Kathy Liu first. She was in the building while you were out.” 

Sevier could not help asking. “Did she say yes?” 

Enckell nodded once, mock-seriously, greenish-brown eyes alight with amusement. “I am sure you will be comforted at the thought of working beside her. Her range scores are terrifyingly good.” 

“I thought you weren’t looking for badasses,” said Sevier. He had fortunately never seen Liu kick anyone’s behind, but something about her seemed to hint that nobody would be getting back up once she was done with them. 

“I am not,” Enckell said, and then there it was again, that fleeting smile. “With her it’s just incidental.”  
\---

Caleb sat on the comfortable couch in his aunts’ living room with Trixie at his side, fumbling with a pair of sticks and a ball of yarn. Aunt Jennifer had noticed his hand tremors last evening, courtesy of the damage he’d done to his own forearms. He found her sitting on the couch alone, with a large book, a pair of knitting needles, and some yarn in her lap. 

“Come here,” she had told him, and he had sat beside her, oddly confused as she guided him through the basics of making a knit stitch. “Knitting’s good for hand strength and coordination,” she explained as he learned how to wrap the yarn around the right needle and slip the finished stitch off the left. “I thought it could be something you do while you’re recovering, so you don’t get too bored.” 

Caleb found the endless repetition of knitting comforting, even while he dropped stitches off his needles, and the weakness in his hands made it slightly difficult for him to manage the yarn. It seemed to induce a curious state of mind where Caleb ceased to think or worry. The only thing that mattered in that tiny space was the next stitch and the next until he had finished the row, and it was incredibly soothing. It was also very addictive, which was why he was sitting in the living room trying to puzzle his way through the process of making a very basic scarf. 

Knitting was ingenious on a structural level and it appealed to him in a nerdy way. At its core it was a way to wind spirals of yarn into each other, the way one could do with an old-fashioned telephone cord or two of those corkscrew hair clips. Since yarn didn’t hold itself open, the knitting needles served as a scaffolding to hold a stitch until another bight of yarn was looped into it, and then it was dropped, the new stitch taking its place. 

His phone buzzed on the coffee table as he turned his square of scarf to knit another row, and he put his knitting carefully in his lap, trying not to jostle the needles, and reached out for his phone.

Paul Sevier had send him a text. _Change of plans. I’m headed back East today._

 _Is everything okay?_ Caleb sent back, his anxiety spiking within his gut. 

It took an agonizing moment for Sevier to reply. _Everything’s fine. Can’t say more, but I’m not in any trouble, it’s the opposite if anything._

Caleb let out a small sigh of relief, forced himself to breathe more deeply. _Can I keep texting you?_ he sent, his anxiety not entirely gone. 

Sevier’s next message took the tension out of his spine and shoulders, and he sagged, oddly weary, into the couch, let the upholstery padding cradle him. _Of course you can. I might not be able to respond but I’ll check in with you when I land._

_Are you in a plane right now? You’re supposed to turn your phone off, you delinquent,_ Caleb sent, realizing only after he had sent it that he probably wasn’t supposed to know about that information. 

_I can neither confirm not deny that. :),_ Sevier replied. _Be well, Caleb._

Caleb put his phone down and took a few moments to calm down, and Trixie chose that time to shift on the couch beside him and place her furry face in his lap. Caleb grabbed his knitting and placed it carefully beside the phone on the coffee table, began stroking Trixie’s forehead. She was a good dog, the best of puppers even in her old age.

Then he thought of Paul Sevier heading back east, thought of the impending Atlantic winter, and he picked his knitting back up and began to knit another row. 

\--- 

Paul Sevier was somehow not surprised to find that he was not going straight back to Baltimore as he had thought. Instead Enckell drove him back to his motel to pick up the rest of his belongings, and then drove to Agent Liu’s address to pick her up, suitcase and all.

“Don’t look so afraid,” Enckell had said to Sevier when he had climbed in the driver’s seat, buckling his seatbelt effortlessly. “I’m not going to get us all killed on the road, I promise.” Sevier wasn’t sure to laugh or just feel depressed at the fact that he had to have a quip ready for passengers who didn’t trust his driving because of his disability.

Sitting to Enckell’s right, Sevier watched him handle the tiny movements of turning the key in the ignition, working the manual transmission, and putting on the handbrake with practiced ease. He moved like someone who had had years to get used to a prosthetic. Unfortunately, he also drove like a retired rally driver, and Sevier realized that the joke could have been about his tendency to take curves at slightly frightening speeds. 

“You drive like my mother,” Agent Liu said as he began to leave her neighborhood, calmly glancing at her phone while she sat in the back seat, completely unperturbed.

“I hope that’s a compliment,” Enckell said with a glance at her in his rear-view mirror.

“Depends on whether you’d be proud of driving hard enough to make someone pass a kidney stone. Saved my dad hours of agony, though, so I think it’s a plus, but I didn’t need the Instagram photo of the kidney stone itself.” Sevier blinked, realized that Liu’s mother was probably most of the reason she was this tough and capable. Part nurture, part heritable traits - they were both remarkable people, and he knew it without having to know her mother himself. 

“Your mother sounds interesting,” said Sevier, unable to read her expression from the front passenger seat. 

Agent Liu shrugged. “Everyone else’s parents sound interesting, Sevier, it’s only ours that seem boring because we know them so well. But yeah, my mom is probably more interesting than a lot of other mothers, she’s spent her life cultivating weirdness.”

“Cultivating weirdness?” Enckell asked from the driver’s seat. His torn-paper voice came as a surprise. He had been silent until now, his attention focused almost entirely on the road, on how the car handled under his touch.

“Mom’s a museum curator, she specializes in fine art,” said Liu. “She paints from time to time herself, but it’s a hobby and she doesn’t think she’s very good at it. The thing is, art history is weird. Artists have more social permission to be eccentric or taboo-breaking. So she knows a lot of weird little facts, and she encouraged me to indulge my oddness a little.”

“I would say she succeeded,” Sevier said with a soft laugh, “you grew up to be an FBI agent.”

“I probably shouldn’t have been watching Silence of the Lambs as a kid, but I went through a bug phase. Started hoarding facts about insects, had a pet hissing cockroach.” Sevier could see it so clearly, a tiny pigtailed version of Kathy Liu terrifying her peers with a large cockroach in her hand. It seemed a very Agent Liu thing to do. “I dropped in on my dad watching it in the scene where Starling goes to talk to the entomologists in the Smithsonian, and I realized then that I didn’t want to be an entomologist, I wanted to be Jodie Foster.” 

“Don’t we all?” Enckell asked, absolutely deadpan, which made the little joke funnier. Sevier didn’t want to presume, but another glance at Enckell showed him the intentional carelessness of his hair, the perfect seams of his closely-tailored suit, and he started to wonder if the man wasn’t entirely straight. 

“Ha,” Liu said, darkly and humorlessly despite her smile. “Then The X-Files became a thing, and Agent Scully was, in modern parlance, ‘totally amazeballs’. I imprinted even harder on Gillian Anderson. I was doomed from the pilot episode, I think.”

“You would have been like, what, 12, to have watched the pilot episode when it first aired.” Sevier said, after a bit of mental arithmetic. He was fairly sure Liu had to be older than him, even if she didn’t show it at all. She just felt weary on some level that he could not pin down adequately, that her poise was something she wore over a desperate need to make the unspeakable make sense.

“I like you, Sevier,” said Liu just a little tartly, “but I don’t think I like you enough to tell you my age.” 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize -” Most of the women Sevier had known were matter-of-fact about their ages, and then he thought of mandatory retirement in the FBI, and understood that Liu could have other reasons to be sensitive about her age.

“I’m just a bit vain sometimes,” she said, “personal flaw, you know? It adds character.” 

\---

Caleb was still working at his knitting when Aunt Jennifer came home from work. “You’re addicted now, aren’t you?” she asked him with a grin.

“I really don’t understand how people think women’s work is stupid, because knitting patterns are like binary programming,” said Caleb as he worked his way across another row. His stitches looked more regular now, and he was dropping fewer of them.

“With the knit and purl?” Aunt Jennifer said as she sat down on the armchair beside him. “Well, there’s other stitches you learn, like increases and decreases, but yes, you can use those two stitches to code something very basic, I suppose. And there’s also illusion knitting, which you might like once you’re more comfortable with it.”

“What’s that?” Caleb asked, curious.

“Illusion knitting is when you use the structure of the fabric - those ridges you have behind a knit row - to hide a message in a piece of knitting,” she said. “Straight-on it looks like a striped garment. But viewed from an angle a message or image appears. Some people have done portraits with it.” 

“That’s something.” Caleb was fairly sure he wasn’t good enough to knit well enough to make a work of art. Not now, and probably not ever. But he wouldn’t mind being skilled enough to do a hat and scarf, maybe mittens or socks, all small things he could knit on the go.

“It’s a bit complicated and requires chart reading, but it can be very stunning,” Aunt Jennifer said. She took his proto-scarf from his hands and looked at the way it tapered from the beginning from the stitches he had dropped as he learned, and studied its increasing regularity and evenness. “You’re learning fast, Caleb. Your knitting is so much neater in the last inch of this. 

“Hm.” Caleb worked his hands and wrists a little to alleviate the slight ache in his forearms. “I guess I should focus on finishing this one first, right?” 

“You might want to just frog this and start another project now your stitches are consistent, so you’ll have something that doesn’t narrow down like this.” Frogging. Right. That was the term knitters used for ripping their stitches loose.

Caleb looked glumly at his first knit object, nodded. “Yeah. Have you got any other yarn, Aunt Jen?” 

“It’s all in the big plastic bins in the basement.” Aunt Jennifer stored her fabric on a rolling clothing rack, each length folded and held neatly by the trouser clips on hangers, all labeled with the date of acquisition, the fiber type, weave, and other characteristics.

Caleb had assumed the bins contained more fabric. There were eight of them, stacked in two columns. That was a lot of yarn. “All of them?” he asked, a little intimidated.

“I can’t help it,” Aunt Jennifer laughed, “there’s this funny compulsion that clicks on when you enter a yarn store, and you wind up going home with a skein or two. Given the time I need to finish a project, I always acquire yarn faster than I can knit it. I thought of teaching Sharon to knit so she could help me use it up, but then she’d probably get the same compulsions I do, and then we’d buy twice the yarn. No, it wouldn’t work.”

Caleb shook his head in amusement. “I feel like you didn’t teach me to knit, you actually infected me with some mind-control parasite that lives in yarn.”

Aunt Jennifer laughed again, this time enough that she had to double over with her hands over her tummy before she recovered. “Knitting is a gateway craft,” she said with a grin. “I know someone who learned to knit later in life because she wanted to make a wedding present, then she got addicted to socks and decided to learn how to spin yarn so she could understand its structure. Now she spins, weaves on a loom, and dyes her own fabrics and fibers.” Aunt Jennifer said, counting off on her fingers.

“The first hit’s free?” Caleb suggested rhetorically, thinking incongruously of a shady figure in an alleyway pulling their trench coat open to reveal beautifully-dyed skeins of yarn. 

“Something like that,” Aunt Jennifer agreed, “I hope you never discover silk-mohair yarn, that’s like the crack of knitting.” Tiger came up to them then, and laid her muzzle in Aunt Jennifer’s lap.

“Could I use some of your yarn stash?” Caleb asked her, steering the subject towards his intentions.

“That depends on what you want to do with it.” Aunt Jennifer was stroking Tiger’s brindled head, letting her fingers pass lightly over the bald patches that were burn scars - Tiger had survived a house fire that had killed all her humans, and Aunt Sharon had treated her pro bono and eventually adopted her.

“I want to knit a scarf,” Caleb said, “but I don’t think this yarn is going to work.”

“For yourself?” Aunt Jennifer asked as she scratched behind Tiger’s ears, inducing a happy tongue-out panting in the boxer mix dog. Caleb felt his throat close on the words he wanted to say, realizing that his face felt hot. He probably looked like a tomato now.

“Oh, I see,” Aunt Jennifer said, just a little bit too smug and knowing. “I think I’ve got some yarn that will look good on your friend. Those dark eyes and that black hair, he’d stand up to deep, dark hues.” Tiger’s tail started thumping hard on the floor under Aunt Jennifer’s continued scritching.

Caleb thought of how Paul Sevier dressed again, that neutral gray tweed jacket that went with everything because of all the other colors flecked into it. The intense blues and gold of his shirts had set off his eyes and complexion so well, and Caleb couldn’t help but agree with Aunt Jennifer’s assessment. “Thanks. I can’t hide anything from you, can I?” 

Aunt Jennifer reached over Tiger’s heavy head and patted him gently on the knee. “You don’t have to hide this, Caleb,” she said, her voice softening some more. “I talked with him yesterday and I like him. He’s quiet, but there’s a real kindness beneath that reserve. He really cares about you.” 

“I know,” Caleb said with a strange giddy heat building just under his diaphragm, a slight nervousness. His aunts would never disapprove of who he loved no matter what, but this reminded him of what truly was at stake when they met again. _I hope I still like him then. And I hope he still likes me._

“Come on,” Aunt Jennifer said, reading the sudden brightness in Caleb’s eyes. “Let’s go downstairs and we’ll find you the perfect yarn for him.”

\---

Paul Sevier sat by a window in a C-40B it crossed the North American landmass. He and several others, Liu and Enckell included, were headed to the East Coast, 3 timezones away from the Pacific, 3 hours into the future. Darkness seemed to engulf the plane as they flew away from the setting sun.

 _I’m really only going to get five hours of sleep tonight,_ he thought grimly, _unless I manage to fall asleep three hours early._

There were no other passengers in this leg of the journey. This plane, with its worktables and its two galleys, sleep compartments and a crew rest area, was intended for senior military and governmental figures and it had been flown from Andrews AFB in Maryland to Oregon specifically to pick the three of them up, along with the other West Coast candidates at two prior stops in California and Washington. 

They would stop twice before arriving back at Andrews AFB to pick up more passengers - other candidates for the as yet unnamed agency, Sevier inferred. The first stop was at Fort Worth, Texas, and the second would be at Scott AFB in Illinois. 

Sevier could not help but think of the two people he cared for most at this point in time - Caleb, still in Portland with his loving and generous aunts, and his mother, definitely still on-shift at Northwestern Memorial, where she still worked. He wondered if she would like Caleb, decided that she would get along with Caleb’s aunts frighteningly well, if she ever happened to meet them. 

_What am I doing,_ he asked himself, _imagining a future where we’re close enough our families visit each other? I’m jumping too far ahead._ And that was true. Paul Sevier did not generally assume everything in his life would go wrong, but he was also smart enough to temper his expectations with a good dose of reality. 

_He’s going to need time, and frankly, so do I._ Sevier leaned back in his roomy seat and shut his eyes, thought suddenly to science fiction. _I’m going to become a Turing cop. Or a blade runner. Not sure I look that much like Harrison Ford, though._ And then he thought, ridiculously, that he was living in the dystopian future he had spent so much time watching and reading about. _If we’re living in that future, he thought, then I wonder where my flying car and hand razors are._ The thought coaxed an almost inaudible chuckle from his throat, and the humor began to banish the worst of his nerves. 

_I guess I always did want to be like Rick Deckard, deep down._ In that way Sevier avoided thinking of the real future by displacing it with a fictional one, managed to calm his longing for Caleb Smith enough to fall asleep. 


	9. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, here you have it, the conclusion to Linear Feedback Shift Registers, as Paul and Caleb reunite after their separation.

Thursday, October 27th, 2016

_Caleb: How are you doing today?_  
_Paul: I’m being trained into the ground, I guess all that desk sitting wasn’t good for cardio._  
_Caleb: I just want to let you know that I’m accepting Blue Book’s settlement. I’m probably going to be independently wealthy for - well, the rest of my life._  
_Paul: Congratulations. Will I have to look forward to a nice Christmas present? ;)_  
_Caleb: You say that like it’s a joke, but I actually do have something for you._  
_Paul: I’m sure it’s going to be nice._  
_Caleb: Six weeks more. I miss you._

\---

Saturday, November 4th, 2016

_Paul: How are you doing tonight, Caleb?_  
_Caleb: I’m good. I went to a dog rescue today, just checking out adoptees._  
_Paul: Meet anyone cute? ;)_  
_Caleb: The problem with going to a dog rescue is trying to figure out who you bring home. I want to adopt them all._  
_Paul: That shouldn’t be a problem with the settlement._  
_Caleb: I did meet this special girl, though. Check the link I sent you. Her name is Antler._  
_Paul: A retired greyhound? She’s adorable. Going to need a coat for the winter weather, though._  
_Caleb: I could knit one, I guess._

\---

Friday, November 11th, 2016

_Paul: Blerg._  
_Caleb: Blerg?_  
_Paul: Blerg._  
_Caleb: Hard day today?_  
_Paul: Did my first room-clearing exercise. Got shot twice with paintballs._  
_Caleb: Ouch._  
_Paul: I suppose it’s better to die in training than in the field._  
_Caleb: Yeah, you get to get back up afterwards._

\---

Wednesday, November 16th, 2016

_Paul: Give me one reason I shouldn’t have someone haul you in for attempted murder. ;)_  
_Caleb: Come on, it was just one photo._  
_Paul: One very naked photo. You will be the death of me, Caleb Smith._  
_Caleb: Thank you. I aspire to excellence._  
_Paul: I appreciate it very much, though._  
_Caleb: Thought you needed a cheerer-upper._  
_Paul: That did a lot more than just cheer me up._  
_Caleb: Then my job is done._

\---

Sunday, November 26th, 2016

_Caleb: Check out this picture._  
_Paul: Aww. Antler is cute._  
_Caleb: Yeah. Her foster mom’s letting her stay over for the weekend to see how we get along. She’s already claimed my couch and my bed._  
_Paul: :(_  
_Caleb: You can’t defend your claim if you’re not here, man._  
_Paul: Oh, it’s on. Tell Antler I’ll be coming for her furry behind_.  
_Caleb: She likes meeting new people. You’ll probably get licked to death._  
_Paul: There are far worse ways to die._

\---

Monday, December 5th, 2016

_Caleb: The shitty part about being independently anything is that I get into ruts where I don’t do anything except play video games. I’m thinking of doing more._  
_Paul: Get a new job, perhaps. Volunteer?_  
_Caleb: I’m thinking of going to grad school, actually._  
_Paul: Any ideas where, and what in?_  
_Caleb: I want to get out of the programming industry for good. After Blue Book._  
_Paul: I understand._  
_Caleb: I was thinking of going to a university close to you if … you know, our meetup two weeks from now works out._  
_Paul: I’m still going to be based in the Baltimore area after this training is over._  
_Caleb: Lots of excellent universities there._  
_Paul: Yeah._

\---

Thursday, December 15th, 2016

_Paul: Would you mind terribly if I postponed our meet-up somewhat?_  
_Caleb: Is something wrong?_  
_Paul: My mother really wants me to visit her for Christmas this year, and she lives in Chicago._  
_Caleb: I could come along, if you’re fine with it?_  
_Paul: I think she’d like you, but everything feels so uncertain now._  
_Caleb: I know, but I miss you, and you miss me. We both want nothing more than to meet again. I think that’s enough to plan the future on._  
_Paul: You’re right. You are. How do you want to do this?_  
_Caleb: Give me the date your holiday leave starts, and when it ends. I’ll cover the tickets. Oh, and your middle name too, I’ll need that for booking._

\---

Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

_Caleb: I’m at the airport, waiting at my gate. I’ll be seeing you soon._  
_Paul: I think my heart is going to explode._  
_Caleb: Please don’t. It’s messy and there’d be blood everywhere. Think of me naked, that’ll divert the bloodflow elsewhere._  
_Paul: Then I’d have other problems._  
_Caleb: I prefer those other problems to the alternative._  
_Paul: I’m sure you do, but public indecency is still a thing._  
_Caleb: Don’t worry, I’m actually a bit shy about PDA. You probably won’t be getting more than a hug and a kiss at the airport._  
_Paul: And that’s entirely okay with me._

\---

Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

_Caleb: I’m heading to pick up my luggage. I’ll be seeing you in like, five to ten minutes._  
_Paul: I brought along a paper bag to breathe into in case I hyperventilate.  
_ _Caleb: You are so ridiculous. OK. I’m going to put my phone away now. We can talk more in person. See you later. (:_

\---

Paul Sevier stood at Arrivals, scanning the crowd for a glimpse of Caleb, and his heart thumped against his sternum wild and frantic like a trapped bird beating its wings. His mouth was dry and his palms sweaty, and he wanted to pace from side to side. There were too many people beside him for that to be a good idea, though, so he just closed his fingers on a metal railing until his knuckles went white. 

The first passengers had already collected their luggage, and Sevier caught a gleam of red-gold hair above a pale blue knit scarf. Thick gray pea coat, jeans, Doc Martens. Caleb turned to glance in Sevier’s direction as he grabbed his roller suitcase and popped its handle out, and he flashed a grin that made Sevier’s heart skip a beat. _He’s here, he’s real. This is happening._

Paul wasn’t sure how many times he had rehearsed this moment in his mind, but in his fantasies they had always run towards each other, embracing romantically as though in a movie. This was real life, however, and he only stood still and waited for the other passengers to leave ahead of Caleb. 

“Paul,” Caleb said, and there he was, slender, fair, but no longer as pale as he had been in Portland. They stepped aside once, twice, and then he was wrapping his arms around Caleb, feeling the life and the warmth and the vitality in him. 

“I’ve missed you so much,” Paul whispered against the side of his head, “it felt like I’d left half of myself behind and I could just feel my nerves stretching to cover the distance. First to Oregon, then to Long Island. Are you well?”

“I am, yeah,” Caleb said as he pulled away, his green eyes bright with emotion. “Wasn’t a bad flight, especially because I rode Business. What’s that?” he asked, glancing at the warm paper bag Sevier held in his left hand. 

“A Reuben sandwich,” Paul said with a grin, “like the second time we met. I thought you might be hungry, given airline food.” 

“Okay,” Caleb said, “tell me you’ve got a thermos of hot coffee somewhere in that enormous coat and this will be the best welcome I’ve ever gotten at an airport.” 

“It’s in the car,” Paul said with a grin.

“You wonderful man.” Caleb tipped his head up and kissed Paul on the cheek, let his fingers linger on the small of his back. “I think we should go, though. Someplace private.” The gleam in Caleb’s eye implied many things, and Paul suddenly had to bite down on his lip and ground himself with that tiny pain. He took Caleb’s left hand in his right, and their fingers twined together as they walked together, side by side, towards the parking deck.

\--- 

Paul Sevier’s apartment was a smallish but comfortable place in a subdivided house, all wood and linoleum flooring and 1950s wallpaper, and it was amusing to see the flowered sprigs on the wallpaper contrast with the sleek IKEA furniture he owned. There was a living room and a small galley kitchen, one bedroom, a bathroom, and that was all. 

Sevier had managed to cover all the available wall space with bookshelves wherever possible, all full of well-thumbed paperbacks and dull-cornered hardbacks with foxing on the pages, and the books put Caleb at ease. He thought to the books in his own apartment, recognized names from Sevier’s shelves. CJ Cherryh, Ann Leckie, Neil Gaiman, and of course Roger Zelazny, among a multitude of others, and knew then that Sevier had been right. They were nerds of a feather. A pity that he’d be spending only one night here this time. They would both be flying to Chicago tomorrow, in the morning. 

“What would you like to do?” Sevier asked him as he shut and locked the door behind him, “we could just Netflix and chill, and I mean that fairly literally. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

“That sounds amazing,” Caleb said with a small grin. He dragged his suitcase around the back of the couch and then took off his peacoat and sat. “What are we going to watch?” 

“I’m not sure yet,” Sevier put the empty thermos on the small dining table, shrugged out of his coat and crossed back to the doorway to hang it up on a peg. “Were the sandwich and coffee enough for you, or would you like to eat something more?” 

“I’d like a hot drink and a snack, but no more, I think,” Caleb said. He took the wool scarf off his neck and then bent to loosen his bootlaces - Sevier’s apartment was cosy, the windows covered with insulating film, and he found himself sinking comfortably into the sofa. 

“Hot chocolate and cookies?” Sevier asked as he looked in his miniscule pantry, brought out a tin of cocoa powder before he went to his fridge and pulled out a carton of cream and a half-gallon of milk.

“Sounds like the food of the gods,” Caleb said with a grin, thinking of the Latin name for the cacao tree. _Theobroma cacao._

“Oh, that’s a clever pun,” said Sevier from the kitchen. He had started spooning cocoa powder and sugar into a pair of large mugs, and was topping them up with milk and cream. 

“Thanks,” Caleb said, and then the mugs went into the microwave. 

“Kahlua in your hot chocolate?” Sevier asked after the microwave had beeped, as he fetched the mugs out.

“Just a finger,” Caleb said, “I can’t drink as much as I used to, meds.” 

“Of course.” Sevier came from the kitchen and set both mugs down on the coffee table, along with a plate of snickerdoodles, and he sat down beside Caleb afterwards to select something to watch.

Caleb took the opportunity to lean his head on Sevier’s shoulder, found it slightly harder than it had been before. “Wow,” he said with a small laugh, “you’re even buffer than you used to be.” 

“I have to work out more, now,” said Sevier, after he selected an episode of Futurama.

“Mhm,” Caleb hummed contentedly, and then Sevier’s arm was sliding around his shoulders, strong and solid and warm. They sipped at their hot chocolate, nibbled intermittently at their cookies until three episodes had gone by. Caleb had slipped into a drowsy half-state by then, ignoring the sound and flash of the television in favor of touch and smell - the fleece blanket they were now sharing across their laps, the texture of Paul Sevier’s shirt, the faint hints of shampoo and deodorant off his hair and skin, and the bittersweet traces of chocolate and coffee liqueur in the air.

“You look like you’re about to fall asleep,” said Sevier as he paused early into the fourth episode they were watching. “Would you like to go to bed?” 

Caleb heard the words, grinned drowsily with his eyes half closed. “Depends on what you mean by it,” he said, teasing slightly. He felt Sevier’s chest expand with a long, deep breath, heard the contented sigh that came next, and then his spine began to melt as Sevier began to caress the back of his head. 

“I only want to go as far as what you’re comfortable with,” Sevier said after a few moments of silence. “If that means just sleeping, I’m fine with that.” 

“Yeah,” Caleb said. He shifted in his seat, straightening up so he wouldn’t fall asleep altogether. “I’m not sure I’m up to fucking, although I’d be glad to neck for a bit. I’m not sure how much energy or stamina I’ll have after a trip especially since we’ll be flying again tomorrow. We’ll just have to book a hotel room in Chicago so your mother doesn’t have to hear us.”

“I don’t know if she’ll forgive me if I do that,” Sevier laughed, “and she’d probably insist you stay, too.” 

“Then we’re just going to have to practice being very quiet, won’t we?” Caleb said, and he grinned knifelike as he saw the flush rising up Paul Sevier’s neck to creep past his collar and leave his face red. 

“You are such an awful tease, Caleb Smith,” Sevier said with a slow shake of the head, but there it was, that slightly crooked grin. 

“Let’s go to bed and practice a little bit,” Caleb said, and then he yelped in surprise as Paul Sevier hauled him easily from the couch in a bridal carry. It was a good thing he was being held up then, because the strength and solidity that maneuver implied made Caleb’s knees wobble, and his mouth go dry.

“Let’s, yes,” Sevier said, and Caleb could not help giggling all the way to the bedroom. 

\---

“How do you want to do this?” Paul Sevier asked Caleb, as they stood on opposite sides of the bed. He felt his face heating, saw Caleb smile at it in the dim glow of the bedside reading lamp. “I normally sleep naked.” 

Caleb remained silent, looking briefly away from Sevier, blushing as well. “I’m going to have to see you sooner or later,” he said with a shy grin. “I sleep dressed, usually. Is that ok with you?” 

“Of course it is,” said Sevier, as he sat on the edge of the bed and started working at his bootlaces, “you can sleep however you want.” He began undressing as he turned back towards Caleb, his eyes focused on Caleb’s own as he started to work his way down his shirt placket. 

“Which side of the bed do you prefer?” Caleb asked Sevier, and he felt his breath catch in his throat as Caleb unbuckled and unzipped his jeans, let them slide off his skinny hips. The tails of Caleb’s shirt hid his hips from view, but his legs were long, slim, and Sevier had to fight the thought, the visual of what propping those legs over his shoulders would be like.

A brief silence passed, the both of them still staring at each other. “I think -” it took a moment for Sevier’s brain to re-engage, “I like the left side.” He finished unbuttoning his shirt and shrugged it off, dropped it in the laundry hamper he kept on his side of the bed for convenience’s sake. 

“And I’m on the right,” Caleb said, “and I don’t mind which side I sleep on.” Sevier could not read his expression - he was taking off his undershirt, the fabric over his face, but he heard a soft gasp as he tugged his way free of the garment. “My God,” Caleb breathed, biting briefly down on his lip, “how do you hide that so well? I have no idea how you were still single when we met.” 

_That_ was his chest, and Sevier found himself laughing, all self-consciousness gone as he read the avidity in Caleb’s gaze. _He wants me,_ he thought, and the revelation zinged hot through him, left him oddly humbled. “Work, mostly,” he said, trying to maintain some sense of decorum, “it’s hard to keep a relationship when you’re not there for most of it.” 

“But we won’t be having this problem now, will we?” Caleb asked. He finished unbuttoning his shirt and dropped it on the floor, the movement lifting the hem of his undershirt enough to reveal a pale flash of belly above the waistband of his boxer-briefs, and Sevier’s mouth went dry. 

“Not so much with what I’m doing now,” Sevier said, his hands moving clumsily as he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his trousers and stepped out of them. He thought for a moment, as Caleb crawled under the covers on the right side of the bed, and then started to sit down on its edge with his boxers still on.

“Aren’t you going to take that off?” Caleb asked, half serious and half teasing, “since you sleep naked.”

“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” Sevier said, very aware of the heat and heaviness of his half-hard cock, mindful of how Caleb probably didn’t want to go further than kissing tonight. 

“I’ll tell you when I’m uncomfortable,” Caleb said. “Right now, I’m very comfortable. Besides, you've seen me naked in pictures.” 

“All right.” Sevier stood back up and turned to face Caleb, made a show of it as he slid his boxers off his hips and let them drop to the floor, stepped out of them. 

“Holy shit,” Caleb breathed, studying Sevier’s nakedness, “you must get so many Grindr requests.”

“No, actually,” Sevier said with a laugh as he sat back down on the bed, dropped his glasses on the nightstand and climbed into bed himself, “I’m not a casual sex kind of man.” 

“I’m almost a little scared,” Caleb laughed nervously as they rolled to face each other, and Sevier let Caleb make the first move, let him run his fingers slowly up the curve of his bicep, the hardness of his shoulder. 

“I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to,” Sevier murmured, “I promise.”

“No, I don’t mean that,” Caleb said, his eyes very bright, intense with emotion, “I trust you absolutely. It’s just that - I think it’s going to take a lot of time for me to uh, be able to ride that.” 

Sevier laughed, oddly merry at the sensation of Caleb touching him, at the movement of Caleb’s ribcage under his hand as his chest rose and fell. “I’ll let you top,” he suggested. 

“I’ll hold you to that,” Caleb said, and then they were kissing, kissing again, all warm breath and slick lips. Pugnacious tongues met, found teeth and silken cheek and each other. Sevier rolled easily over as Caleb pushed him onto his back to tuck an arm around his broad chest, hook a leg around his left before their lips touched again. 

They kissed until they were breathless, until their lips and tongues were sore, and then Sevier was content to lie back and let Caleb press his mouth to his jaw, the side of his neck. They lay silently against each other after that, warm and safe and secure as Caleb yawned loudly, his head against Sevier’s shoulder. 

“I think we should try to sleep now,” Caleb whispered after the yawn, squirming a little in bed until he found a more comfortable position, “we both have a plane to catch tomorrow, and I’ll be meeting your mom and I have to be on my best behavior.” 

“She’ll like you,” said Sevier as he pulled Caleb a little closer to his chest, held him a little tighter. “I know it.” 

“She must be a wonderful person for you to have turned out like this. You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met,” Caleb said, his eyes half-closed and drowsy, and Sevier pressed a last kiss to the crown of his head, inhaled the smell of him through the shampoo he used. 

“She is,” Sevier agreed, and then he let his eyes close, felt Caleb’s hand slide up his chest to rest over his heart. He reached up himself and twined his fingers with Caleb’s, wanting to be as close to him as possible. 

“Goodnight, Paul,” Caleb murmured softly into his ear, his hot breath a reminder of the warmth of his kisses and the delight thereof.

“Goodnight, Caleb,” Sevier said, and then he turned the bedside lamp off, and darkness filled the room. 

Sevier let his head sink back into the pillow, and then heard Caleb whisper into his ear. “I love you,” he said. 

“I love you too,” Sevier replied, and then all was silent as the world went on outside this cocoon of warmth and safety and affection, as the winter wind blew in the streets of Baltimore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, everyone who was involved in getting me into this pairing and who were cheering me on the way as I wrote this: Thank you. I love you all. I hope this fic will continue to make you and future readers happy.


End file.
